


Dark-Eyed Mender

by Tigerine (sealink)



Series: Heavy Rotation [4]
Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emetophobia, Eye Trauma, Gore, M/M, Terrorism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-26 03:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2636273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealink/pseuds/Tigerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noiz is just interested in Rhyme. With the development of his own Drive-By, he can get the feeling he craves any time he wants. After Oval Tower falls, he focuses his efforts on reverse engineering Rhyme. Despite his contact with Mink, he's not interested in getting roped into some crazy plot to take down Toue--unless he finds Toue has something that's worth fighting for...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Before reading this fic, I highly recommend reading "Signal", a standalone work in the Heavy Rotation series. It explains some of Noiz's thought process and sets him up for the events of Dark-Eyed Mender. The timeline of this fic overlaps with the Minkuri fic in the same series, "Carry That Weight", but focuses more on Noiz's role in that same KouAo bad end. This fic is planned to be about 30,000 words or so (but that was my target for CTW and I overshot that by 10k, so we'll see.)
> 
> While this fic is not Explicit yet, it will be in later chapters. Thanks so much to tumblr user harukami for beta on this chapter~
> 
> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine

Noiz looks at the notification on his Coil, turning his eyes back to the screens in front of him before he’s even accepted the call. “Yes?”

“Noiz!”

“Mujina,” he replies, staring at the familiar readouts, his eyes so used to them that he almost can’t see anything new.

“Are you still holed up in your apartment?”

“Yeah,” he says, picking up a pen off the desk and clicking it rhythmically before tossing it down on his worktable. It narrowly misses one of the bunny cubes that are stacked three high; the topmost one springs down on the table and bounces in place, turning to face him.

“You have got to let that go,” Mujina sighs over the Coil. “It doesn’t even affect how the Drive-by works, does it?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the point of figuring out what it is?”

“It’s still something that’s getting called from Toue’s servers,” Noiz retorts. “Letting it continue to run will draw attention whenever I use the code.”

“And you’ve been through the code.”

“Yes.” Noiz picks up the pen again, beginning to tap it against the table thoughtfully in time with the light surge that sweeps through a Rhyme field. He knows the timing intimately. It twitches in his fingers, throbbing, like a pulse.

A moment of silence comes over the Coil and then Mujina sighs again. Noiz hears the ring and snap of him lighting a cigarette with a windproof lighter. Noiz can already envision what he looks like at this moment, cigarette dangling from the first two fingers on his right hand, the other stretched behind his head self-consciously. “I’m not one to tell you how to code anything,” he starts in a voice that means that’s exactly what he wants to do. “But maybe you need to take some time off the Drive-By project for a while.”

“What else would I work on?”

“Why do you have to work on something?” Mujina blows smoke out and Noiz hears him tap the lighter against the side of his desk. “Come out to Rhyme tonight.”

“What?”

“Seriously, leave your black arts for later and come out with us.” Mujina’s chair creaks loudly, and the sound of the call changes; he’s gone outside on his balcony to stare at Platinum Jail. “There’s a Rhyme match just off Aoyagi. We have enough money right now, you don’t have to worry about perfecting your Drive-By to sell it when we’re rolling in cash from micro-transactions.”

“That’s not why I’m working on it.”

Mujina pauses and Noiz can almost hear the way his eyes are looking up the tall, curved sides of Platinum Jail. “I know, but it is nice, isn’t it? The money?”

“I don’t care about money,” Noiz grumbles. The bunny cube regards him quietly, its light-up eyes switching to a sad emoji and then cycling through a heart and a playful cat-faced emoji as it bounces in place on his desk. Noiz watches it dispassionately; the cute behavior is one he specifically liked in this model’s base emotion set, but right now it’s irritating. He doesn’t want Mujina’s attempts to pet down his hackles, nor Usagimodoki’s attempts at cheering him up with his emotion set. He wants to know why there is something happening in his Drive-By that he didn’t write into it. He begins clicking the pen again.

“You can add to your undefeated record if you get your name in the pool,” Mujina baits him with the idea of another notch on his gun. “The team loves to see you win.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Mujina.”

“There are only a handful of undefeated players out there. They’re proud to have you on the team.”

Noiz’s lips twist in a scowl and he grunts noncommittally.

“The longer you play, the harder it is to stay undefeated. They want to learn from you.”

“ _No one_ is going to be able to learn how I play,” Noiz snaps, throwing the pen on the desk. He stands up, moving to the balcony of his own apartment and looking up at Platinum Jail. “If they are interested in learning something, they could learn to code things themselves.”

“So come out and tell them that yourself.” Noiz hears Mujina take another drag from his cigarette, and then the long, slow exhale. “It’s not good for you to stay shut-in all the time,” Mujina says finally, his voice taking on a slightly wistful quality. “It helps out the team a lot when you code, but…it helps just as much when they get to see you. You’re their hero, you know.”

“Hero?” Noiz finally laughs, bitterly.

“You are,” Mujina repeats. “They look up to you.”

“I’m younger than more than half of them.” Noiz makes a face at the Coil, childishly sticking out his pierced tongue, knowing at the same time that he’s right. He’s hit a wall in the code that he can’t see past, and staying here staring at one piece of it won’t help him understand the bigger picture.

“Doesn’t mean they can’t look up to you, _senpai_ ,” Mujina teases.

“Shut up,” Noiz says, walking back over to his desk and picking up the strings of bunny cubes that lie on his desk. “It’s on Aoyagi Street?”

“Yeah. Get here early.”

“You’re lucky I’m coming at all.”

Mujina barks a laugh; Noiz cuts the call before he can hear any more of it and turns his head toward the bunny cube that is sitting on his desk. “Usagi.”

“Pi!”

“We’re going out.”

“Understood!”

Noiz lives in the slightly better-off Western District, his apartment bought by the code he’s been writing for Ruff Rabbit. It’s good enough living that he can make it without a roommate, which suits him. Other people just get in the way.

The pedestrian traffic is heavy; people are leaving jobs and heading home. It is early in the evening and shops are still open, but the bars have begun to attract their evening crowds with cheap specials on beer and grilled food. Ruff Rabbit will likely descend on one of these izakaya later, especially if someone in the team gets pulled up for a game of Rhyme.

Noiz’s footsteps quicken at the thought of a match.

He hates to admit that Mujina was right; few people know him well enough to make judgments about his emotional condition. Somehow Mujina changed from a guy who approached him after a Rhyme match into something that others might call a friend. Noiz knows better. Mujina wouldn’t have approached him at all if he hadn’t been good at Rhyme, good at code. He doesn’t need Mujina, but Mujina sure needs him, and Noiz is careful never to let that balance of power change.

Noiz turns down an alley just wide enough for an economy car to pass through, but stacks of pallets and boxes and low rolling dustbins would make that impossible. Filthy water splashes over his shoes as he hustles through the narrow space. He passes a few people, their Allmates held in their arms or picking their way past the trash and puddles of questionable origin.

The Rhyme arena is in a courtyard on the inside of a block; there are already dozens of people milling around near the walls, waiting for the Rhyme match to begin. Everyone has their Coils open, keeping their activity levels up so they’ll get added into the pool. Players are chosen by Usui at random from the pool of registered Rhymers in a 30-meter radius, and inactivity reported by the Allmate chip means getting kicked out of the pool.

“Noiz!” One of members of Ruff Rabbit calls him over to where a few of them are sitting on boxes, each of them fiddling with their Coils and Allmates. Mujina is there as well, sitting on top of an empty crate, his slim body drowning in mint-colored clothing too large for him. His Allmate, a dark green wolverine, is in a sleepy pile at his feet. He looks up through his bangs as Noiz approaches and flashes him a winning smile.

“Glad you could make it.”

“Shut up,” Noiz retorts, but he leans against the boxes next to Mujina anyway. “When does Usui show up?”

“Probability is the densest for the next twenty minutes, half hour,” Mujina replies, reaching into the pouch on the front of his jacket for his pack of cigarettes. He offers one to Noiz out of habit before remembering that Noiz doesn’t smoke, and withdraws the pack with a shrug. “We’ll get it more accurate the more we make predictions,” he says as he slips a cigarette into his mouth. “We’re good at figuring out where—damn good—but the when keeps giving me trouble.” He lights the cigarette, blowing the smoke into the air and snapping his lighter shut. He jerks his head over at the other members of Ruff Rabbit. "Those guys have been here for two hours."

Noiz looks at them, an impressed sound leaving his mouth. "Heeeeh, what diligent Rhymers."

Mujina sucks in a mouthful of smoke, holding the cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. "They're eager for action," he says, his dark eyes flicking to Noiz. "Just like you."

"I'm not _that_ eager," Noiz retorts.

Mujina grins, the cigarette’s burning end wagging dangerously close to some of his hair. “Maybe,” he says knowingly.

Noiz looks around at the other teams, standing in clumps. “Big pool tonight.”

“I could have told you that,” Mujina says, knocking off the cherry of his cigarette. “We made almost double our usual take for predictions this week.” He nods slowly to himself as he takes another drag, his eyebrows lifting in acknowledgment. “Even if I don’t get to play as often, the money is good.”

“Is that all you care about?”

Mujina laughs. “Didn’t think I’d hear something like that from you, Noiz.” He points at Noiz with his cigarette, an incredulous grin on his face. “Rich kid like you? Don’t you like money?”

“It’s not that great,” Noiz scowls.

“Yeah, well,” Mujina says, inhaling quickly and then blowing the smoke out in a puff. “It’s easy to talk like that when you don’t have it. Doesn’t matter to you anyway,” he chuckles. “You’re the kind of maniac that does code for the love of it, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Noiz doesn’t answer, but turns away with an angry pout, fiddling with his Coil and looking through the pool of participants. Everyone is listed by their Rhyme name; real names are not shared unless the player specifically requests it. He looks through the list of participants in the pool, the pout dropping off his face as he slips into a state of hyperfocus. Some of the names he knows, some he doesn’t—Talisman, SoCrush, Puppet Master, Route 44, Usuikushii, KING CANNIBAL and so on down the list—he looks at their Allmate model and chassis, their attributes, their stats. He takes them apart in his mind one by one.

“Heads up, I’ve got movement on the network,” one of the junior members says, turning over his shoulder to seek approval from his Head. “Take a look?”

“Mm,” Mujina grunts, flicking his cigarette butt away and opening his Coil. A few moments of looking at network traffic and he whistles. “Handshake at the local node—“

“—it’s authenticating—“

“Yeah, it’s coming down,” Mujina says, the last of the smoke coming out of his nostrils. He runs his hand through his hair and nudges the wolverine at his feet. Noiz takes Usagimodoki out of his pocket absentmindedly, tapping it twice on the box next to him to wake it.

“Noiz!”

He doesn’t look at the bunny cube. “Just put us in the pool.”

The movement near Ruff Rabbit’s Head hasn’t gone unnoticed by other Rhymers in the vicinity, even the ones who don’t have a team. Everyone stands up and begins to shake out their arms and legs, ready for a tense fight. There must be nearly a hundred and fifty people trying to push their way forward to see the arena, to be chosen.

The holofield appears in the preview menu, and today’s battlefield is grimy and apocalyptic, befitting the downtrodden alley they’re in. The sun has yielded afternoon to evening, but here at ground level in the alley it is rarely brighter than twilight.

“First match invites should be out, read your messages and accept!” Mujina barks at Ruff Rabbit. He is the social face of the team, who encourages the junior members and builds a spirit of camaraderie. Individual victories increase Ruff Rabbit’s renown, which serves to drive funds into their pockets. Just as there are those who follow Noiz and Ruff Rabbit for Noiz’s undefeated record, there are those who admire someone like Mujina: followers looking for coattails to ride to the top.

A hoot goes up from a Rhymer across the way—one of the chosen. No one in Ruff Rabbit received an invite; they sit back and wait for the participants, eager to see what the fight looks like, and maybe learn something about a future opponent. One voice lifts up above the crowd, beginning a chant. “Usui! Usui!”

Two people are already walking into the space where the holofield will be projected. Noiz recognizes one of them, a smug bastard in a leather jacket with the handle ‘Route 44’. Noiz’s eyes flick down to look at the participant pool again; the two players move into the game lobby. He makes one more pass over the participant pool and his eyes catch on a familiar name.

_It’s him._

“Now, sorry to have kept you waiting, everyone! Rhyme will now begin!” Usui’s voice booms out over the cheering crowd, but everything is just background noise, receding into a drone.

_Sly Blue._

“Today’s first battle is between Rhyme name ‘Player’ and ‘Route 44’!”

Noiz lifts his head, his lips half open.

_Here._

His eyes flash across the crowd, looking for someone he hasn’t seen before, a new face he doesn’t recognize. It’s useless; everyone is screaming and yelling, their arms lifted above their heads to cheer on the players. There are so many strangers, people not on teams, and all of their faces are twisted as they holler and carry on. He curses under his breath, grabbing Usagimodoki and beginning to push through the crowd. Mujina watches his retreating back for a moment before turning his attention back to the combatants.

“Noiz! Your heart rate is elevated!”

“Quiet!” Noiz hisses. In the arena, the players finish their preparations and the game suspends their movement reflex to avoid them injuring themselves. Above Usui’s uppermost set of hands, a large monitor opens to display the Rhyme field. Noiz doesn’t even look.

“GAME START!!”

The raucous crowd and wild cheering surges, but Noiz Is searching every face, working his way around the perimeter. A potent cocktail of panic and irritation assails him; what if he leaves since he can’t play? What if he decides not to play again and this was just a fluke or something like a ghost in the machine?

Thinking quickly, he pulls out his Coil again, connecting to his home server to pull up specifications for Sly Blue’s Allmate. Maybe he can spot it in the crowd if he knows the chassis. He sifts through the file, looking at the information, processor, synthetic muscle fibers per square inch, no consumption capacity, online form—blue, it’s _blue_ —the chassis is an old Toue model. A dog.

The match progresses; he knows the sounds of the attacks as they blare out of the monitor, contradicting Usui’s serene face. A glance up at the damage totals provokes another string of swearing; Route 44 has gotten some lucky breaks. He doesn’t have enough time to find Sly Blue before the match ends.

And then, to make things worse: “HEY, YOU ASSHOLES!”

Confusion and panic seizes the crowd at the stern black uniforms of the police, their batons, the unapologetically apoplectic Akushima. They scatter every which way. Noiz looks at the arena, at the contestants that are still trying to get used to being in their bodies, used to the pain they’re now feeling from their injuries in Rhyme. One cop lunges forward and whips his policeman’s baton forward against Route 44’s ribs, the reinforced aluminum rod clanking against the studs on his jacket.

“Shit,” Noiz curses. If it hadn’t been for the fucking cops he could have—

No time. Need to run. Foreigners were automatically under suspicion; he’s already pulled the whole ‘can’t speak Japanese’ thing once before on Akushima and he doubts it will work again. He tears around a corner, skipping along sideways and pushing boxes down behind him to keep the cops from following. The alleys behind the block are labyrinthine, and after a few turns, their angry shouts fade away as they catch slower, less wily prey.

Even though Noiz cannot feel pain, he is out of breath, and he puts his hand on the wall for a moment, bent at the waist and gasping for air. He can still pass out if he doesn’t breathe enough, regardless of the fact that his lungs don’t feel like they’re on fire. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, noticing that one of his bandages has come unbound. He tugs at it, getting ready to wind it around his hand, his shoulders heaving.

“You're that guy, Rabbit Head.”

Noiz snaps his head around, finding two other figures here in the alley with him. They are similarly pained by shortness of breath. The tall one has his hands on his hips, high color in his cheeks and an entire outfit made of plaid. The shorter one is cleaning his glasses, his suit jacket unbuttoned. Two pairs of unnaturally blue eyes are fixed on him.

“We've seen your bouts on the Rhyme circuit before. What a triumph for you,” the smaller one purrs.

Irritated at losing his quarry the first time he’d been spotted, Noiz snaps back, “Is there something you want?”

The two of them exchange looks; the shadows of the alley paint hollows in their faces where the halogen lights of the adjacent street can’t reach. The smaller one puts his glasses back on and runs his hands over his hair, smoothing it down as he looks at his companion. “I think our friend has found us out already, Trip.”

“Oh, he's very smart.”

“We have an interest in your work in Rhyme,” the shorter one says, his glance falling on Noiz again.

Trip stands up straight, rolling his broad shoulders under the plaid vest; parts of his shirt are dark with sweat. Noiz is used to fighting in groups, even bare-knuckled, but these two have a dangerous grace about them that has him weighing his options. He thinks about his sap gauntlets, useless in his pockets instead of on his hands. At least if he has to run again, it can be out into an occupied street. “You don't seem like you'd be into playing Rhyme….?”

“Virus,” he says helpfully, brushing off his lapels. “You might say it's a professional interest.”

Noiz has been in Japan long enough to recognize the Japanese way of speaking around things that are rude or uncomfortable. Virus being as direct as he is just means that he’s one more person that wants something from him. Noiz makes a disgusted face and starts to walk past them. “If you're looking to get in on match predictions, you should talk to Mujina.”

A long arm stuck out in front of him bars his way and Noiz turns his head with a ready snarl on his lips. Trip looks at him placidly from under his heavy brow. His voice is quiet; a car driving on the street nearby nearly drowns him out. “You've been doing more than just predicting matches.”

“What?”

“What my partner is trying to say is that we've noticed you've developed a unique ability in Rhyme.”

“You can generate a Rhyme field on your own.”

Noiz snorts. “Anyone can make a training—“

“Not a training field.” Trip’s voice changes. He sounds sharper, more cunning, as if he has been play-acting at being drunk to disarm everyone around him.

Virus changes as well. The polite smile is still present, but his eyes are cold and penetrating. “Creating Rhyme fields with two opponents without going through Toue’s servers shouldn’t be possible anymore, technically speaking.”

“A Drive-by,” Trip chimes in.

“So we must ask, what's the secret?”

Noiz looks between them, at Virus’ smile that barely conceals a threat, at Trip’s hulking strength, likely the threat he’d be facing. “I'm not sharing it,” Noiz states bluntly, trying to walk past them again. Again, Trip moves to stand in his way.

“We can compensate you.”

Noiz backs up a step or two, folding his arms over his chest, eyeing them warily. This kind of talk usually comes when someone is making an offer with terrible terms that isn’t meant to be turned down. “I have more than enough money.”

“Oh, we wouldn't dream of trying to buy such information.”

“Too valuable.”

Virus smiles again, his eyes mostly closing. “I would like to suggest a trade. You tell us how you're creating Rhyme fields without Toue's servers and we'll tell you about Sly Blue.”

Though he’s caught his breath again, the mention of Sly Blue makes it catch in his throat. The kind of match that he could have with Sly Blue, the feeling that such a legendary opponent could provoke, it makes his mind run a million miles a minute. Noiz leans toward them slightly in spite of himself. “What do you know?”

“Where you can find him. He's got great stats, right?” Some of Trip’s charming oafishness has slipped back into his voice, but Noiz knows better than to trust the act now.

“The truth is, we were big fans of his Rhyming back when he was active.”

Trip grins broadly, looking at Virus. “He was ruthless.”

Virus nods along with him. “He destroyed people without a second thought.”

“We want to see him like that again, that look in his eyes as he destroys someone,” Trip purrs, and not for the first time, Noiz begins to wonder how much of his mannerism is just a convenient way of handling anyone who underestimates him.

Noiz looks between the two of them speaking blithely about Sly Blue destroying his opponent. Surreal as it may be, Sly Blue hasn’t had a game in years. Maybe undefeated was just the way he wanted to leave the game; Noiz couldn’t guess. But the way these two talked almost lovingly about his thirst for blood in the arena made his heart begin to race again.

“Fine,” he says, taking Usagimodoki out of his pocket. A thumb on the top wakes the bunny cube up, and Noiz opens screens on his Coil. Virus steps forward, lifting his hand and opening the screens on his Coil. The program transfers over within a matter of moments.

“Excellent. You can find Seragaki Aoba at the Junk Shop Heibon. He works there,” Virus says, his false smile firmly in place.

Trip leers at Noiz. “I’m sure you could think of a way to get him alone.” He exchanges a knowing look and wolfish grin with Virus.

“Indeed,” Virus replies, closing the screens of his Coil and folding his hands politely in front of him.

“Seragaki Aoba... “Noiz lets the name live in his mouth, feeling it on his tongue. He doesn’t move, thinking about how to go about getting his Rhyme match with Sly Blue. He’s so preoccupied with it that he looks up at the two of them, something nagging at him as an afterthought. “What are you going to do with the code?”

Virus seems genuinely surprised at the question, his eyes opening wider than they have during this entire process. His behavior is a façade, just like Trip's, and Noiz hopes that this is the last time he runs into the two of them. The surprise melts away, replaced with a serious expression. “Nothing much. We simply need to see that you're not overwriting Usui.”

“Overwriting Usui?” Noiz frowns. He doesn’t know anything about how the old Drive-bys worked, but his simply doesn’t call Usui from the server and fools Toue’s servers into thinking it has, as opposed to deleting Usui’s presence or rendering it inactive once the game has started.

The two blonds share another look as Virus' false smile returns. “No, Usui is special,” Virus says, and Noiz thinks that he is telling an entire truth without speaking around it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After losing to Aoba, Noiz gets roped into a rescue mission in the hopes of having another Rhyme battle with him, but Aoba and Koujaku vanish without a trace in Platinum Jail. Meanwhile, Noiz discovers that the anniversary event has brought with it some changes, and he has to choose between Ruff Rabbit and his Drive-by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine  
> I love hearing from you, please don't be afraid to drop in my ask box! 
> 
> This chapter has taken a long time to write because I had to work some unexpected information into the plot. I think most of the information has been incorporated successfully, but you will have to be the judge of that. Thanks for being so patient with me. Hopefully the next chapter won't take as long, but I'm also working on finishing up my thesis, so it might take a while anyway...

The Drive-By match against Seragaki Aoba goes poorly; there is some glitch in the system that Noiz still can’t account for, some _reason_ that Sly Blue regained so much health. There has to be. No one gets a free pass in Rhyme like that without hacking, and there are very few people who are better at both hacking and Rhyme than he is.

Noiz’s curiosity drives him; he wants to figure out Sly Blue, his programming, how he has hacked together an unbeatable strategy out of a few lines of inscrutable code and a technological dinosaur of an Allmate. He gets roped into a daring plot to rescue someone. He risks his life for this wild scheme because there is nothing else for him to look forward to but Rhyme.

Three days afterwards, Toue’s anniversary event has come and gone with no word from Aoba. Noiz sequesters himself in his apartment, looking for Koujaku or Aoba; a radio band scanner in the background is unusually silent while he flicks through the security feeds he’s able to access. Usagimodoki is essential to helping to manage the feeds; multiple bunny cubes help him keep tabs on multiple bands of information. More than that, the Allmate keeps Noiz drinking water and eating at least once a day when he can’t peel his eyes from the screens.

There isn’t anything interesting about the festivities themselves. Noiz can hear the pop of Platinum Jail’s fireworks even in the Western District; sometimes the smoke obscures the cameras. The parades end and the event is announced as a great success, the beginning of a new era for Toue International. People continue on about their business; the masses on the video feeds thin out and the skies above the island are crowded with private jets leaving the resort. Slowly, life on Midorijima returns to normal, without Koujaku and Aoba.

On the night of the fifth day after the raid, a call comes through, late at night; it’s Mink. There’s no conceivable reason Mink could be calling him. If Noiz doesn’t know anything, then Mink doesn’t either.  He lets the call go to his messages, but that it happens at all confirms Noiz’s fears. He shuts off the video feeds and closes all his screens; even working on programming the Drive-By seems like wasted effort. His one and only challenge in Rhyme has gone missing within the walls of Platinum Jail.

When he checks in the morning, there is only a cryptic text message from Mink: _Avoid loudspeakers. Be cautious._ Noiz frowns and deletes it; it’s simple enough that he can remember it without saving it. Mujina also called and left a voice message. Still in his underwear, Noiz goes to look out the window at the late morning sky and lets the message play.

“You’re usually awake at this time of night—are you screening my calls? Anyway, we need to talk. Something’s changed about the probability of Usui’s appearances; I sent you a few outcomes last night but didn’t hear back. We need to put the code together, see what’s going on with it.” Mujina sighs on the call, sounding as if he’s already spent several hours mashing his brain against the problem. “Only thing I can think of is that something’s happened with the anniversary, something they’re pushing down the servers that’s making prediction harder. Just… give me a call when you get this.”

He snorts softly. _No one needs you until they’re in a tight spot. Then suddenly everyone is an expert on your sleeping habits._ Noiz wanders into his kitchen and pulls out a leftover pizza box from the refrigerator. He carries the entire thing back into the living room and opening the door to his balcony. The first slice is cold against his tongue, but this is itself a form of pleasure. He rests the box on the railing and surveys the buildings around him.

Noiz’s apartment is near the top floor; he pays extra for the sunlight, although it was sold to him as a ‘view’. The morning breeze is cool, with the promise of greater heat in the afternoon.  Even though his apartment is on a small rise in the land, Platinum Jail rises hundreds of feet further still above him. The sun is high enough that it strikes the top of the walls and glints off the sky projection suspended under the dome. He takes another piece of pizza out of the box, even though he’s not particularly hungry. Chewing thoughtfully, he keeps his eyes on Platinum Jail, as if there might be an answer that he could get simply by looking.

But the morning is mild, and nothing comes.

The wind shifts suddenly, and the pizza box, now two slices lighter, flaps off the edge of the railing. Grabbing for it too late, Noiz looks over the edge at the box, hanging on the railing of an apartment two floors down. The pizza is a lost cause on the pavement of the alley floor.  He pushes the last of the crust into his mouth in a wad and heads to take a shower.

Usagimodoki bounces in place on the floor, hopping after him as he walks into the bathroom, the LEDs on its face cycling through happy, excited, and encouraging emojis. Noiz getting up and moving around is encouraging to the little Allmate, especially after he’d spent so many days watching screens, waiting for something that never came. At least if he has something to do, to focus on, he will eventually find some other powerful opponent and forget about Sly Blue.

After his shower, Noiz gets dressed and walks out the door without really considering where he’s going to go. He takes the steps slowly. Mujina and the problems with the code can wait for him to get some caffeine.  The street in front of his apartment building is not deserted, but not active. He checks his Coil; it’s just before midday. Mothers with toddlers work their way down the street, and a few workers dash to get lunch from convenience stores to eat at their desks.

A songbird perches on the branch of a tree, dark and plain. Noiz watches it as it hops from a bend in the wood, sidling out on one of the whip-thin branches. It tilts its head, craning slightly and looking down at him with the wary regard of a prey animal. He stays still, watching it, and after a moment, it seems to grow inured to his presence and opens its beak to sing. The song is simple, low-high, low-high, and an ululating call at the end. Noiz listens to it three times through; the bird begins to do variations, parts of its own song that interpret the main call in its own voice.

With no indication that the song has affected him at all, he turns and walks around to the edge of the building.

The alley to the side of the building is clear; Noiz looks up, seeing the pizza box still hanging off the lower balcony. He shrugs and continues walking; it’s not his problem.

“Pi!”

Noiz takes his Allmate out of his pocket; it’s rare for the little bunny cube to speak up when they’re out walking. “What?”

“There is activity on the network!”

“Rhyme?”

“It’s not Rhyme!”

Noiz steps into the alley, frowning. There isn’t supposed to be a game until tonight, but he had to ask anyway. He opens his Coil, leaving Usagimodoki on top of a nearby box. Something tickles the edge of his mind.

_Avoid loudspeakers. Be cautious._

Noiz lifts his hands and covers his ears. His blood roars in his ears, a deep thrum that sounds like a volcanic eruption. A song fills the air, haunting even through the flesh and bones of his hands.

Usagimodoki bounces in place, spinning around. The LED display on its face cycles through alarmed and curious emojis, occasionally adding in one of anger or frustration. He looks at the loudspeaker again and then back down at Usagimodoki. “Is it safe?” His voice sounds distant, as if through cotton, underwater. The bunny cube’s face vanishes, flashing an X up at him, and Noiz scowls, leaning back against the wall and sliding down until he’s sitting on the ground. He can do nothing but wait. Two more minutes pass before Usagimodoki bounces again and then flashes an O up at him and Noiz slowly peels his hands away from his head. He can hear clearly again, but everything is silent.

“What was that?”

“Unknown!” Usagimodoki replies. “It used Rhyme’s data network!”  It’s only a few dozen feet to the sidewalk; Noiz covers it in a few strides and looks up the street. The mother down the street has crouched down; her toddler is wailing, chubby fists pressed against his temple. There is no sign of the salarymen, but a courier riding on a scooter is simply stopped in the street, his engine putt-putting while he stares at his handlebars. The courier lifts his head slowly and then seems to remember himself, lifting his hand to his helmet and shaking his head slightly. His hand twists the handle and he motors off without looking behind him. Walking backward, Noiz slowly drifts back to the alley, watching the courier shrink smaller and smaller in the distance.

In the alley, a few keystrokes brings up a report of network traffic for the island. Filters narrow his summary down to the hundreds of servers that manage the large network of holo projection fields that cover nearly every inch of the Old Residents’ District. “The biggest pipe on the island,” Noiz murmurs out loud. “What needs so much bandwidth that isn’t Rhyme?”

Rhyme servers are meant to handle the large amounts of data that a Rhyme game generates. The network should have been able to handle a simple audio file on its own, without taking advantage of the Rhyme server network’s capacity. Whatever was being pushed down through those speakers wasn’t simply an audio file. It was something much bigger than just a song.

Noiz closes the screens on his Coil, looking down the street. He looks up at the songbird, beginning to sing again on its branch. Next to it, so cleverly hidden he had taken no notice of it, is a set of loudspeakers, a thatch of grass and twigs nestled in the crook between them. The mother and her toddler are gone, the child having gotten over whatever provoked his tantrum. Cars and trucks seem to be moving again as well, but the song that poured from the loudspeakers essentially brought all of the Old Residents’ District grinding to a halt.

_Why should I care? Why should I care at all about these people and what happens to them? It’s not like anyone has helped me or cared about me. Living alone is the best way to live._

To a point.

Noiz realizes he can’t remember why he left his apartment.

“Usagi,” he says slowly, “what am I doing out here?”

“You were going to pick up something before talking to Mujina about the Rhyme code. An energy drink, pi!”

Right. An energy drink.

“Why did Mujina need to talk about the Rhyme code? What’s wrong with it?”

An emoticon of confusion displays on one of the bunny cube’s faces. “The predictions have been off, since the anniversary event!”

Right. Predictions have been off since the anniversary event. Noiz looks down at Usagi and then picks up the bunny cube, shoving it in his pocket. The walk to the convenience store is non-eventful; he watches the clerk for signs that anything is wrong. If anything, the cashier seems more cheerful than usual, happily offering to bag up Noiz’s items with something akin to zeal. It’s not bad, but it’s not normal.

He walks back through the street slowly, going up the stairs to his apartment. Traffic continues past him, uninterrupted by further songs. Foot traffic associated with the lunch rush begins to pick up by the time he reaches his front door. He closes the din outside with the daylight.

Noiz unclips the strings of bunny cubes from around his hips, draping them over the desk as he walks through to the kitchen. They would be Allmates on their own, but Noiz has hacked them together so that they operate like expansions to Usagi’s memory, with a graphical effect in Rhyme that adds rabbits for each additional unit of processing power. He drops Usagimodoki on the desk along with them and taps it to turn it on.

When he enters the kitchen, he just shoves the entire bag of energy drinks into the fridge with the rest of the takeout containers. He takes one of them with him and walks back to his desk. His chair creaks as he nearly throws himself in it; he tosses an energy gel on the desk in front of him and leans back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Which one is more important?”

Usagimodoki bounces in place. “Pi?”

“Rhyme or Midorijima?”

Usagi doesn’t seem to understand the question. “Rhyme is more important!”

Noiz cracks open the energy gel. He sucks the contents into his mouth, flattening the pouch until nothing is left. “Usagi.”

“Pi!”

“Which one is more important, the Drive-By or Rhyme?”

Rhyme keeps him in delivery pizza and pasta, energy drinks and the occasional gulp of water. The Drive-by is where he wants to lay his attention, figuring out what is going on with that line of code.

“Rhyme!” Usagimodoki chimes, and Noiz nods slowly. If nothing else, he cannot spend time figuring out the Drive-by code if the predictions are so wrong he cannot sell them. He lifts his Coil and places a voice call to Mujina.

Mujina picks up on the first ring. “Noiz?”

“You wanted to talk about the code for the Usui predictions?”

“Yeah, I can’t make heads or tails of it.” There’s a series of sounds that Noiz recognizes as Mujina opening and closing several windows on his Coil, as if he can’t find the file he wants to refer to. “It’s been three days since the anniversary event, and there have been three Rhyme games. We didn’t get our numbers right on any of them.”

“How much were we off by?”

“It varies, but at maximum, nearly five in either direction, so—

“—a ten point margin of error for each probability—“

“Yeah. Add that up that effect through the whole matrix and it was completely useless.”

Noiz grunts. “After the first missed prediction, did you try running the models again?”

“It just gave me the same result, even when I included in the different observed time.”

“Do you think it has something to do with the song broadcasts?”

“The what?”

Noiz frowns, spinning the empty energy gel pouch in his fingers like a fan. “The songs that are being broadcast from a public loudspeaker.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“They’re using the Rhyme data network to—“

“Noiz, have you slept at all in the last few days?”

Noiz scowls. “Just look at the server usage reports. You _do_ remember how to access those, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I haven’t heard any songs broadcast from anywhere. If there’s a lot of traffic on the Rhyme network, I guess it could be related to the predictions. Maybe they’ve got a new algorithm for selecting game locations that is more dynamic?”

Mujina speaks but all Noiz can hear is the time he’d wanted to spend figuring out Sly Blue slipping away. Any problems in his Drive-by will take time to figure out. Instead, he’ll be spending his time fixing the Rhyme code predictions while the problems with his Drive-by go unaddressed. It will be a few days before he can even begin to look at his code, much less figure out where the problem is.

Noiz clucks his tongue. “Fine. Send over the code and the values you tried in the matrix. I’ll see what I can do.” He pauses for a moment, and the hesitation doesn’t go unnoticed.

Even though Noiz is the team’s leader, he is not the one who keeps the team mobile and active. Noiz is the undefeated star and leader of Ruff Rabbit, but Mujina is the team’s promoter and social contact. The team doesn’t exist without him, the same way it doesn’t exist without Noiz.

“You got something else you need to get of your chest?” Mujina is always ready to listen to team members when they have problems; he likes that kind of team relationship, being someone that others admire and respect.

“It’s probably going to take me a while to figure this out.”

Silence stretches over the call. “What do you mean?”

“I might have to modify a lot of the code, change how it talks to the servers. That’ll take time.”

“So… what? You need someone to bring you stuff? Make sure you’re getting your 3-2-1?” Three hours of sleep, two hot meals and one shower, necessities that are easily thrown aside when deep in solving a programming problem.

“If I’m in the middle of this, I don’t want to be interrupted. For anything.”

The call is quiet and then Mujina sighs. “I’ll talk to everyone, see if we can work something out.” Noiz is about to hang up when he hears Mujina’s voice over the line, tense and anxious. “You can do it, right?” 

“What, fix the code?”

“Yeah.”

“I can do it,” he says.

The relief in Mujina’s voice is sincere and palpable. “Good. I don’t know what Ruff Rabbit would do without you." 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With his daily concerns taken care of by Ruff Rabbit, Noiz becomes a recluse, communicating only by Coil and with the runners that bring him food. It's all in the service of figuring out how to make his Drive-by work perfectly, culminating in his first face-to-face encounter with Gamemaster Usui.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine
> 
> Thanks for being so patient in waiting for this update. I've been writing this chapter off-and-on in ten minute breaks between thesis work. Thanks again to my fantastic beta, tumblr user harukami. Hopefully the next time I post, I'll have my degree locked up.

“Simulated Rhyme field stable!” Usagimodoki chirps brightly, hopping in place. The other bunny cubes surround it, hopping in unison.

Noiz leans to the side in his chair, propping his face up on his hand and looking through his screens at readings of the simulation’s success. The simulated field holds stable for about three minutes before it begins to decay due to the demands placed on his system. He watches until he sees the glitches begin to appear in the environment, and then nods to Usagi to cut the program short.

“Pi!”

“If this doesn’t work…” he mutters out loud, half to himself and half to Usagi. He looks balefully at the screens with this week’s predictions, pushed to the side to run the simulation, and motions them forward again. He looks at the code and then back at the screen with the simulation on it. He has still not been able to remove that smear of light from the Drive-by. With a disgusted sound, he leaves the simulated field running and moves back to working on the predictive code.

Windows of error are steadily shrinking, down from 2 hours with a 20 minute probability density cluster to 45 minutes with a ten minute probability density cluster. Noiz thinks he can improve it even more, getting the time with highest probability-of-appearance down to five minutes. The ability of Usui’s number generator to randomly choose game locations seems to have decayed as weeks have passed. Following the anniversary event, it’s like Usui no longer appears _randomly_ at all.

The pattern isn’t immediately obvious, but Noiz can see it cropping up with each iterative run of the predictive program each week. In time, others will see it as well, and Ruff Rabbit’s command of the Rhyme information market will slip.  He hasn’t told Mujina yet, but there is a limited amount of time that he can continue to make selling predictions a profitable venture.

But more predictable appearances leave more of his time free each week to work on his Drive-by.

His eyes slide back to the simulation, and he stands up, walking over to the sleek black couch in his living room. He wants to test this now.  The movements on his Coil are encoded in his muscle memory; precise and businesslike, he enters the Rhyme field.

The lobby is the same as any other Rhyme game; within a few moments his heartbeat synchronizes with the pulses of light that sweep through his vision. He enters something like a fugue state, moving through the checks he does before any match with ease. A tap of his finger on the screen selects a nearby opponent. Almost as soon as he does, the smear of light appears at the corner of his eye. He turns to look at it as a polite voice says the match is about to begin, and it dances away, seeming to know where he is going to look before he does so. It’s as he expected; none of the changes he’s made removed the light at all.

It doesn’t matter to him that he is good at Rhyme. Being good at Rhyme is an outgrowth of seeking sensation with no fear of pain, no fear of failure. He doesn’t understand fear as an aversion to a stimulus, but now he is starting to get an inkling of what it is like. It is entirely too close to the feeling of not being able to meet the expectations of his parents.

The Rhyme field closes out at his command, and Usagimodoki hops in place next to him on the seat, emojis on its face cycling through concern and sadness. “Noiz!”

“What?” he snaps.

“The Rhyme field was stable!”

“Yeah,” he mutters. “It was.”

“But we didn’t play!” The bunny cube seems confused; all it has known is Noiz’s addiction to Rhyme. For Noiz to suddenly develop some kind of aversion to playing Rhyme is new. Programming for this contingency doesn’t exist.

“No, we didn’t,” he says bitterly. “Something is wrong with the code. When I can figure it out, we’ll play again.”  

Usagimodoki hops in place silently, seeming unable to decide on a course of action other than bouncing on the sofa.  Noiz realizes that it can’t argue with his reasoning or his motivations—it is just an Allmate, so Noiz’s obsession with Rhyme as a source of sensation is a concept of which it can’t conceive. But it does understand wins and losses, and interprets Noiz’s offhand comments about ‘feeling’ to mean the feeling of winning. To Usagimodoki, the loss to Sly Blue shattered its master’s confidence, and if Noiz will not play, he cannot recover from it.

Grabbing the bunny cube, Noiz walks back over to his desk, sitting down in the chair. Letting Usagimodoki hop onto the surface, he moves the predictive code screens so that they take up the bulk of his desk real estate. He is just about to get into the flow of testing model fit again when his Coil rings.

“Noiz!”

Mujina. “What do you want?”

“Just wanted to check in, see how you were doing, if you were out of anything. I could send a runner over with whatever you need.”

“Just the usual,” Noiz says, and he means some sort of delivery pasta or pizza. He doesn’t take out the garbage more than once or twice a week when someone comes over, and it’s all cardboard boxes and plastic sacks with disposable chopsticks rattling around inside.

“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” Mujina says conversationally. “Maybe even a month or two. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m still getting the predictions to you on time, aren’t I?”

“That’s all very well, but—“

“Then put the money in my account and leave me alone.”

“Now I know you’re bent out of shape about something.” Mujina knows him as well as anyone does, and once he gets the feeling that something is wrong, he latches on and doesn’t let go. It’s this quality that makes him a good face-man for Ruff Rabbit and a determined opponent in Rhyme. His confidence is unnerving, and Noiz sighs.

“It’s the Drive-by.”

“Are you _still_ working on that?” Mujina lights a cigarette, the metallic snap of his lighter clicking shut echoing over the call. He likely doesn’t mean anything dismissive by it, but Noiz can’t help being defensive about it.

“It’s none of your business what I do with my spare time.”

Mujina blows out a lungful of smoke. “So what have you tried?”

“Everything.”

“You can’t have—“

“I have taken everything out that is not necessary. Damage limits, textures, sound files, authentication keys. _Everything_ , Mujina.” It’s unusual for him to speak this way about anything Rhyme-related, and Mujina seems to heed this warning not to press his luck.

“Okay, so you’ve tried everything, what about just troubleshooting the code you have?”

“I’ve _done_ that.” Noiz picks up a pen off his desk and begins to click it open and closed in irritation.

“You know I like to just think out loud, come at the problem from a different angle—“

“That’s fine if you’re not debugging something,” Noiz sneers.

“It works regardless of what you’re doing.” Noiz rolls his eyes slightly, glad this isn’t a video call. Mujina takes Noiz’s sullen silence as permission to continue. “You took Usui out of the Drive-by, right?”

“Right.” The bunny cube on the desk hops over to its comrades, the lights in the eyes indicating data transfer. Two of the cubes respond, their eyes lighting up, and they begin to play a small game of leapfrog across the table, each jump punctuated with a “Pi!” as one cube bounces over another.

“So make a Rhyme field with just you and Usui.”

Noiz frowns, narrowing his eyes at the screens in front of him. “What?”

“You’ve tried a subtractive approach, just try an additive one, is all I’m saying,” Mujina says around his cigarette.

“That doesn’t even mean anything,” Noiz scowls, flinging the pen across the desk.

“If you’re going to keep working on it, you need to try something different. The definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

“I don’t have to tolerate that from you, Mujina,” Noiz bites out, but he has to admit that it would be a novel approach. At least, if it fails, it’s one more thing that he knows doesn’t work.

“If you make a field with just you and Usui, you should be able to compare what gets called down with your Drive-by, right? Just find the code that’s the same in your Drive-by and take it out.”

“Hmph.”

“You know it’s a good idea.”

“It’s better than what I have been doing.”

“And you’re embarrassed you hadn’t thought of it yet.”

“Shut up,” Noiz mutters.

It takes him less time than he thinks it will, knocking together the program from what he had saved back and labeled from his initial inspection of Rhyme’s code. It’s the essence of what Mujina calls his ‘black arts’; a frenzied weekend of caffeine and coding. He accepts dinner from a Ruff Rabbit runner, and then questions the same member why he’s back without realizing that an entire day has passed. He is so deeply into it that he doesn’t notice that he needs to have the Rhyme field predictions done until the day they need to be sent out to customers.  When his Coil rings, he answers without thinking about it, his fingers flying through setting the parameters for the model.

“Yes?”

“Found you,” a deep voice says.

“What?” Noiz frowns at his screen and then finally looks at his Coil, but the name and number are unlisted.

“My men aren’t the best at electronic warfare, and you’re good at hiding, Maniac.”

Maniac?  “You must have me mis—“

“Did you avoid the broadcasts?”

He recognizes the voice as belonging to the tall, dark-skinned Ribster that heads up the prison team. Mink. “Mink.” Noiz begins to put a trace on the call, following the network activity back to a disposable Coil. “You’re the one responsible for those network outages.”

 “Where possible. “

“It’s inconvenient.”

“I know,” Mink replies, and Noiz frowns even more at the bravado in Mink’s voice.

The Coil is functioning somewhere in the Northern District. He can’t get more precise without tethering to an Allmate chip and using that information to help pinpoint him.  “Fine, so you’ve made yourself a nuisance,” Noiz snaps, closing the trace. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“Did you avoid the broadcasts?” Mink repeats.

“Yes.”

Mink makes a satisfied hmph. “That’s one you owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“You can get into Toue’s networks. Go and see what you can find.”

“You want me to do your tech work?” Noiz snorts a laugh. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Do it on your own to satisfy your curiosity.”

“I don’t care about whatever Toue is doing. As long as—“

“—as long as your game stays operational, it’s fine what happens to anyone else.” Mink’s icy retort would sting harder if it weren’t true.

“Yeah, it’s fine what happens to anyone else,” Noiz says quietly. “It’s not my problem.”

“No, probably not,” Mink says. “But you owe me a tip.”

“A tip?”

“Same as I did for you. A message if you come across something interesting.”

“Need my skills but not willing to pay me?” Noiz scoffs openly.

Mink’s irritation finally begins to show in his voice, and Noiz likes the sound of it. “Just listen. I’m looking for someone.”

“I don’t care who you’re looking for. I am not going to help you,” Noiz says.

“Aoba.”

Noiz freezes in place and he can’t help but frown at the call timer. “Don’t joke with me.”

“It’s not a joke.”

“I looked for him.” It’s an admission that Noiz doesn’t want to make, but he can’t really ask Mink to accept something without proof. “For days. He’s vanished. His Allmate chip is deactivated, Rhyme profile removed. He’s disappeared.”

“Maybe. But he hasn’t left Platinum Jail.”

“So what, you think he’s being held prisoner?”

“He’s working with Toue. Or he’s been brainwashed by him.”

“What?” Noiz pauses for a beat, waiting for Mink to elaborate, but Mink doesn’t volunteer the information. 

A soft exhalation comes across the line. “All I need from you is to know where in Platinum Jail he and Red are.”

“If I could figure that out, I’d have done it weeks ago.”

“That’s why it’s a tip. If you come across the information, just remember that you owe me.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s it.”

“Good. Don’t contact me again.” Noiz cuts the call short, fuming. It’s all anyone wants him for, to use him for his abilities and then leave. Mink is just like anyone else: he doesn’t care about Noiz at all. All that matters is how he can use him for his own ends.

Noiz looks at the bunny cubes, and the lights on their faces cycle through question marks and smiling faces. He chuckles bitterly and reaches out to grab Usagimodoki, holding the bunny cube in his hand.

“Pi!”

“How’s the compiling coming?”

“75% done!”

“I’ll finish the predictions,” Noiz says, putting Usagimodoki back down on the desk.

“Noiz!”

“Hn?” He is already beginning to sink back into the algorithms.

“You should take some time to take care of yourself!”

“What?”

“The last time you took a bath was three days ago!” The other bunny cubes begin to bounce in place, their small chirps confirming Usagimodoki’s statement.

“I’ll just finish this and then go,” he says. He looks back at the screen and doesn’t see the worried emojis moving across the faces of the bunny cubes.

He’s as good as his word, moving off to shower after he drops the predictions matrix in a message to Mujina’s Coil. Noiz scrubs himself, watching his skin turn pink under the cloth without feeling why. There’s no point bothering to modulate the water temperature either; he knows that if his skin begins to turn red, it might begin to blister, but he lets the shower linger on it after he’s rinsed off. He’s just beginning to feel something, a hint of something warm, when it disappears, slowly fading away, back to nothing. The water heater is empty. It’s just as well. He has a date with Usui.

His hair is dry by the time he sits down on the couch with Usagimodoki next to him. “Ready?”

“Ready!” Usagimodoki trills.

“Engage the Rhyme field.”

“Rhyme field, engaged!”

The world falls away around him, but Noiz is already moving to lift his Coil before all his senses have been rerouted into Rhyme. He briefly feels the cool leather of the couch against the back of his neck, but it disappears, along with the rest of his world. It is replaced by the soothing blue lattice, pulsing with light. His heartbeat slows and synchronizes with it. The rabbits gather around him, knocking their gloves together, although there will be no one for them to fight, unless Usui decides to take a swing at him.

The thought sends shivers down his spine.

“What should we do, pi?”

“I don’t know,” Noiz says. There may not be much time until this illegal Rhyme field is detected and shut down. With Usui definitely being called from the server, it will take only moments for the match to be flagged. “Start a timer as soon as we leave the lobby. See how long we have before we’re kicked out. Run a log of network events.”

“Roger!”

He completes his Rhyme checks to the best of his ability, wondering why he even spent time on this idea, and then confirms his decision to enter the game field. The map is the basic Rhyme map, without any added scenery. It is as boring as a map can be, with no personality, nothing to indicate who is playing.

“Guess that’s normal, facing Usui,” Noiz mutters. His bunny scenery and bleeding hearts are nowhere to be found.

“Network activity!”

Noiz lifts his head, scanning the field around him, looking for Usui to materialize. He realizes he hasn’t seen the smear of light yet, not once, not even in the lobby, but he recognizes the mote of light that sweeps out a circle well before Usui appears, hovering inside it.

“So the light _is_ from Usui,” he grumbles. It’s valuable information, but frustrating all the same. He lifts his foot to take a step towards the Gamemaster, and Usui’s deep voice booms through the field.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, everyone! Rhyme’s start—“ The voice cuts out, like a microphone was unplugged, and then begins again. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, everyone! Rhyme—“ And it cuts out again.

“It’s trying to call the voice files,” Noiz murmurs, watching the hands and arms move, gracefully going through flowing movements. Usui does not speak again, swaying back and forth, with the smallest sound of tinkling bells echoing in the field. “Now what?” Noiz says.

“No movement on the network, pi!”

Noiz narrows his eyes, looking at the serene face behind the veil, squinting. Even though it’s obscured, there is something familiar about its face. He takes a step forward.

“Network activity!” Usagimodoki yells, but Noiz has already seen what’s happening. Usui lifts its left leg, holding it out in front of it like a dancer, the rest of the Gamemaster perfectly balanced on one foot. The arms move with more purpose, and the way Usui is holding its hands changes; the wrists spin, and different fingers move together. The sway of its hips, the gentle pendulum of its hair begins to swing faster, and then its left foot comes down.

Noiz comes to his senses only a few minutes after being forcibly ejected from the Rhyme field. There is a dull ache behind his eyes, and it takes him a moment to realize that the pain is one he can feel outside of Rhyme. It’s not much, and it’s not strong. He almost thinks he could sleep through it.

But it’s a feeling. Sustained and persistent pain, outside of Rhyme.

“Noiz!”

Noiz looks down at Usagimodoki, unable to stop his eyebrows from drawing together. “Usagi…”

“Are you okay, pi?”

“Did you get anything useful?”

Usagimodoki’s face slips through worried and afraid emojis before it answers. “Network activity log from the local node!”

“But nothing internal?”

“Correct!”

“How long were we in for?”

 “One minute forty-five seconds!”

“That’s not long enough,” Noiz says, blinking rapidly and getting to his feet to stumble toward his desk chair, already wanting to modify the program. “Definitely not long enough.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Noiz continues to take apart Usui's programming, answering one question just makes three more arise. A strange ejection from Rhyme has to take a backseat to Toue's invitation-only Rhyme tournament, held in Green Playground. Noiz goes because he hopes Aoba will make a surprise appearance...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine
> 
> This chapter contains a warning for emetophobia.
> 
> Thanks again to tumblr user harukami for her wonderful beta skills. I really couldn't do it without her <3

This is his sixth Rhyme session in a twenty-four hour period. Noiz has taken to wearing his Rabbit Head outfit indoors. He has been delighted to discover that the polyester fur at the base of the head makes the back of his neck itch like mad for a few minutes after exiting a Rhyme field. Red and angry, he lets the faux fur continue to grind against his skin. Slowly, he is conditioning himself to need less and less time to recover between encounters with Usui.

 “What’s the network look like?”

Usagimodoki lifts one paw to its headset, checking the activity on the network. “The same!”

“We’ll go in, then.”

“Roger!”

The lobby of the Rhyme game vanishes, each blue spindle of light shattering and reforming to create the playing field. The now-familiar mote of light sweeps out a circle, responding to his call as fast as if it were a regular match. The bunny cubes pop into existence all around him and they wait for Usui to appear.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, everyone! Rhyme will now--”

Usui’s voice, deep and booming, fills Noiz’s ears, and for once he is so overstimulated that it hurts. Noiz’s face splits in a grimacing smile. He slowly draws in a breath. “We’re on packet 71.”

“Sorry to keep—“

“Roger! Beginning code package comparison!”

Noiz checks a timer on a screen. Two minutes remaining. The Gamemaster floats on the other side of the arena, serene and composed. The veil is nearly opaque, moving gently in an air current that doesn’t exist, the hands and feet carefully placed, as if beckoning Noiz forward.

“Package 71 finished! Beginning package 72!”

The voice files glitch again. Despite Noiz’s skill, he has not yet been able to stop them from getting called from the main server; it appears to be something integral to Usui itself. He can create the field and manage how his field calls for and interfaces with Usui, but as far as internal communications between Usui and the game servers, he is in the dark. The voice works like a timer, decomposing at a relatively normal rate and giving Noiz a rough estimate of how much time he has in the field.  

How much longer he can feel, and how much longer until it starts to fade again.

“Sorry to keep you—“

Noiz creeps closer to Usui, inching around what he thinks is the outside of its detection radius. Even after weeks of creating Usui-only Rhyme fields, he is still learning what he can and cannot get away with against Usui. Most things he cannot get away with, but walking at a distance seems to be allowed. When he gets closer, that’s when strange things begin to happen.

Sometimes the field crashes when he gets too close, forcing him out into his own body with painful repercussions that last for hours. Sometimes Usui itself terminates the connection with the unauthorized field. Rarely, he finishes the comparison tests he was hoping to run before his time is up. These times he just stares at Usui until the connection is lost, turning over thousands of questions in his brain. The face behind the veil never changes, even as he runs his tests, but the best kind of judge is an impartial one. 

The voice glitches again. He only has about thirty seconds left.

It is nearly useless for him to try to observe behaviors to determine the code necessary to create them; he has an idea of how he thinks it might work, but without looking at code he can’t say for sure. And that has led him here, to comparing what he knows of his raw code with Usui’s executable programming. Weeks of trial and error have netted him some information, like the detection radius, but the rest of it will have to be gleaned by brute force comparisons of code.

Reverse-engineering the programming that created Usui isn’t impossible with his resources, but only just. But it’s not the most impressive thing he’s ever seen, it’s just a matter of skill.

Noiz shoves his hands in his pockets. “Makes you wonder how he did it.”

“Pi?”

“That Aoba with his old Allmate.”

The light at Usui’s feet churns, fading and swelling like a lighthouse in a storm. Noiz narrows his eyes, watching it for an instant and then looking up at Usui. The face behind the veil is as blank as ever, but Noiz’s heart skips a beat.

It is looking at him.

“Usa—“

The Rhyme field splits in two and Noiz’s reality rips apart. The Allmate chip in his body seizes his consciousness and draws him back into his body. He opens his eyes and shoves the false rabbit head off, gasping for air.

“Noiz!”

He’s vomiting before he even realizes that the overturning in his stomach is nausea, an unwell feeling made suddenly urgent by the lingering effects of Rhyme. His arms shake as he empties the meager contents of his stomach onto the floor in front of his couch.  Tears form at the corners of his eyes as his body tries to expel whatever sensation that was, that sundering of worlds.

He rubs his mouth with the back of his hand and looks at the bunny cube on the couch.  The only emoji on its face is one of alarm.

“I’m okay,” he says, slumping against the side of the couch and looking at the puddle on the floor. The back of his neck feels clammy; he reaches up to touch it, shivering. As sensations go, dry heaves are more intense than the headaches the Usui fields give him. He wants to see if he can make it happen again.

“Usagi?”

“Pi!”

“I still had time left on the clock, didn’t I?”

“About twenty seconds!”

“Why did I get ejected with so much time left?” Usagimodoki does not respond, and Noiz leans his head on his hand, looking at the bunny cube. “I know I didn’t get inside its detection radius because it didn’t dance this time.” He wipes his mouth again on his sleeve, staring off into space. “What does the network traffic look like?”

Usagimodoki opens up a screen with a bounce. The emoji on its face hasn’t changed, and Noiz seems to register this for the first time. Maybe it is better to clean this up first. By the time the area is wiped up and disinfected, he’s no longer trembling, the feeling of exhaustion eroded away into the usual numbness.

Usagimodoki hops in place on the table. “Noiz!”

“Hn?”

“You should take a bath!”

Noiz glances down, discovering that the front of his shirt is streaked with sick. Usagimodoki’s faces shift from alarm to concern and it hops in place again.

“What a mess,” he mutters, pulling it away from his body with a mild expression of disgust. He walks into the bathroom, shucking his shirt. Checking his pants in the mirror, he finds that they didn’t escape his illness entirely unscathed either; a spot about the size of a ten yen coin is dark on his thigh.

_How disgusting you are, having gotten sick everywhere! Clean it up before someone sees you!_

He rubs at the spot with one finger, thinking he will just let it slide until tomorrow.

_You should be ashamed of yourself, having the nerve to appear in front of me in such a state._

Noiz turns on the taps and gets a washcloth to dab at the spot.

_No wonder no one wants you._

His belt rattles in the small washroom as he unbuckles it.

_It’s just as well we locked you away. How embarrassing!_

The intercom buzzes.

Noiz looks up at the mirror, the reproachful voices of his parents vanishing from his mind. The intercom sounds again as he meets his own eyes.

With a scowl, Noiz stalks out to the panel next to the door and presses the button. “Yes?”

“Noiz, I’m on my way up.”

Mujina. “I’ll leave the door open.”

He unlocks the door and then goes back into the bathroom, starting up the shower and stepping under it immediately. Steam begins to cloud the glass of the mirror but the water feels neither hot nor cold.

“Oh, God, what happened in here?” Noiz doesn’t answer, even though he can hear Mujina walking through his apartment. The bathroom door opens a moment later. A sigh precedes the relief in Mujina’s voice. “Couldn’t even close the door to the wet area?”

“It’s _my_ apartment.”

“It’s weird,” Mujina says. “Your bathroom should be private.”

“I’m the only one here. The whole place is private.”

Mujina opens his mouth and then closes it, seeming to accept the logic of Noiz’s statement. “You’re okay,” he says lamely.

Noiz pauses in the middle of scrubbing his scalp to frown at Mujina. “Of course I’m okay. I just buzzed you up.”

“Are you sick?”

“Nope,” Noiz says bluntly, and turns on the shower to rinse himself off. Mujina tucks his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and leans against the bathroom wall.

“I opened your balcony door to air out the room.”

Noiz pauses and then shuts the water off, pouring soap in his hand and using a cloth to wash himself. He didn’t ask Mujina to do that, but it probably doesn’t matter.

“I’ll ask again. Are you sick?”

“No,” Noiz replies, jerked out of his reverie. “Are you?” At Mujina’s blank look, he snaps the top of the soap closed. “You don’t usually visit me yourself. You usually send a runner.”

“Noiz, do you know what day it is?” When an answer isn’t forthcoming, Mujina lifts his hands and runs them through his hair in exasperation. “Today is the exhibition tournament in Green Playground. I sent you a message about this a week ago.”

“In Rhyme?” 

“Yes? What else would it be in?” Mujina retorts. “Ruff Rabbit got an invite for two people.” He pulls one hand out of his pocket, pointing to Noiz and then himself. Noiz turns on the shower again and stares at the spray before directing it at his shoulders.

“Why should I care?”

“It’s in the best resort in the world. You can meet people, make connections.” Mujina holds out his hands plaintively. “Rhyme is about to explode. It’s going global, and you can get in on the ground level, sign some sponsorships for Ruff Rabbit. There’s going to be cash rewards for—“

“I don’t care about money.” Mink’s warning needles the back of his mind. If something happens at Green Playground, then it would destroy the best minds in Rhyme. Anyone from the Old Residents’ District would be honored to be invited, and too starstruck by Platinum Jail to be on their guard. It would be an easy way to deal with anyone that was threatening the stability of Rhyme where the island-wide brainwashing had failed.

The shower sputters in his hand.

“I know that, but it would be nice visibility for the team, especially if you compete and place.”

Competing and placing means visibility. Toue himself will see Noiz’s face and know his username, as will everyone else. How long can he reasonably continue to test Usui once he’s well known? On the other hand, Aoba is still in Platinum Jail, as near as Noiz can tell. There might be a chance, however small, that he will show up to the tournament and play.

“Usui will be there too.”

“Idiot, Usui is in every match.”

“No, the physical Usui unit.” Mujina leers at Noiz. “You want to see it, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t have a physical unit. It’s part of the game’s programming. It’s not like an—“

Noiz stops mid-sentence and slowly turns his head to look at Mujina, who is grinning from ear to ear. “I thought that might catch your attention. Your mouth is actually open.” He tucks his hands back in his pockets with a smug look.

Noiz closes his mouth with a snap. “How long ago was this announced?”

“The tourna—“

“No, Usui being there.” Noiz spins the taps off and gets out of the shower, grabbing a towel.

Mujina averts his eyes as Noiz dries off, walking back into the hall next to the kitchen. “Maybe two weeks ago?”

It’s a trap. It feels like a trap. But the combined bait of Aoba and Usui feels too strong to resist. If something bad is going to happen, then that’s simply how it’s going to be. It’s not like he cares much anyway. Noiz snorts softly as he walks into his bedroom to get dressed. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

The travel to Green Playground is made by specially-arranged car. Mujina is all but plastered to the windows, watching the scenery fly by as the car speeds up and enters the expressway. Multicolored displays blend together into a river of light on either side of the traffic lanes and Platinum Jail looms ever larger in front of them.

Noiz keeps his eyes facing front, watching the roadway.

Their credentials are checked at the border automatically; they don’t even slow down for the guardpost on the outside of the wall. The tunnel going through it is short, but there is no light at the end of it; artificial night is perpetual in Platinum Jail.

“Holy shit.”

Noiz glances to the side, where Mujina is fogging the window with every breath. “What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? We’re _inside_ Platinum Jail.” The awe in Mujina’s voice doesn’t resonate with Noiz at all. Fancy cars, fancy parties, fancy people—none of it has any meaning to him. But he hums mockingly, like he’s impressed, and Mujina frowns at the patronization. “Well it’s new to _some of us_ , okay?”

“Yeah,” Noiz says, directing his eyes back to the front. For a moment, he meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They are an unsettling shade of pink.

Green Playground is crawling with people eating from open air food stalls and drinking in the streets. They seem to have no earthly cares at all, laughing as they go about their daily lives in pursuit of digital pleasure, which can be had in Green Playground in any amount. The car rolls to a stop in front of a packed curb, and several flashbulbs go off as the driver opens the door.

“Oooh, it’s the representatives from Ruff Rabbit!”

Mujina offers a winning smile to the photographer and uses his fingers to make a little rabbit face before Noiz can get out of the car and spoil the shot with his obvious disinterest. A photographer dutifully takes a picture and then bows to the side, getting ready for the next guest and comparing photos with a shooting partner.

 “Rowdy,” Noiz says, shouldering aside some of the crowd and pushing toward the club’s entrance.

“Yeah,” Mujina replies, looking over his shoulder at the line of spectators waiting to get in. “They’re all here for the exhibition. It’s a big deal.”

Inside, the club is even more crowded, throbbing with music and pulsing with laser light. A large arena has been cleared out in the center of the dance floor, though some people are trying to dance in the corners. The bar is painted with slick green floodlights, each bartender sporting a wild hairstyle and body jewelry that glows in blacklight; the female bartenders sport equally lurid body paint with suggestive messages and motifs.

“Hey, you’re from Ruff Rabbit, aren’t you?” and Mujina nods eagerly in response to the question yelled over the music by a dark-haired man in a sober suit and glasses. He lifts his Coil and makes a note of their arrival. “Participants come this way, please.”

The two of them trail along behind him as they cross the club. Mujina nods to Noiz’s outfit and says, “Smart move wearing clothing that reacts to blacklight. They’ll pick you for sure.”

“Pick me?”

“Not everyone is going to get to play. They’re doing the Rhyme pool like a regular match.”

Their chaperone shows them to a waiting area right next to the arena that is cordoned off. Dozens of other Rhyme players are already waiting; some of them are from teams that Noiz recognizes, but others are unaffiliated. None of them smile as Noiz and Mujina join them.

“Our reputation precedes us,” Mujina says with a conspiratorial grin, and then he nudges Noiz’s shoulder. “I’m already in the pool. Go ahead and put yourself in so you can be ready for the first match. I’m going to get us a drink.”

Noiz scowls. “You know I’m not of age.”

“Right, right, I got it,” Mujina says airily, patting him on the shoulder and melting into the crowd.

The other Rhyme players don’t seem interested in striking up a conversation, which is just as well, since Noiz has things to do. After waking Usagimodoki, he turns on his Coil and begins scanning the pool of players, looking for that name. That Sly Blue.

But he goes through the whole list once, and then again, and there’s no Sly Blue waiting to play. There’s no old dog Allmate either, and given how attached Aoba had been to that thing, it is unlikely he’d play with anything else. He is disappointed, but not surprised.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, everyone!” Usui’s voice booms through the club, and the music recedes to a dull roar. A cheer goes up from the crowd as a spotlight is directed at a door on one side of the arena. “A special game of Rhyme will now begin!”

“Hey, it’s the tournament skin!” Mujina rejoins Noiz, pointing up at Usui. “The special palette swap that will appear on Usui whenever someone who participated in the tournament plays Rhyme.” Mujina pushes a drink into Noiz’s hands and then takes a sip of his own.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, it’s one of the prestige awards for even getting to play, much less _winning_. Maybe eight, ten people in the _world_ will have that skin on Usui.” The admiration in his voice can be cut with a knife.

The arena lights go up, and the entire atmosphere of the club changes, bathed in red and pink. The spotlight is shut down just as a figure enters the doorway. It is the gamemaster, as real as Noiz is, as real as Mujina is. When it steps forward, it is left foot first.

Sheathed in skintight black, with red armor on its shoulders, it promenades, gliding through the arena with each step. Gnarled red growths sprout pigtails that are black at the roots and fade through red and down to pink at the ends. The high heels are spangled with blue-white lights, as are each wrist. They flit through Noiz’s vision and leave trails that are entrancing to see but hard to look directly at. Usui’s hands are constantly moving, forming new shapes and joining fingers together in symbols Noiz doesn’t understand.

“Player selection has begun!”

The spotlight appears on Usui again, and it is even more dazzling, shimmering and glittering with every movement. The sway of its walk makes a half-skirt move sinuously around its hips. It walks over to the player area at the corner of the arena, and here, Noiz can see that the tournament Usui is unveiled, sporting only a red crystal in the center of its forehead.

Noiz lifts his hand to point it out, but then turns to look at the other Rhymers. All of them are watching their Coil screens for notifications; none of them are even paying attention to the vision in black and red.

Noiz’s words are lost in the excited screams of the audience, in the stentorian roar of Usui’s voice, in the tense silence of the players around him. “It… Usui is…”

“Player invitations are going out now!”

Usui’s lips do not move, but the head turns and meets Noiz’s eyes directly. It is looking at him, and it has Aoba’s face. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tournament gathers all kinds of people in one place, but Noiz is thinking only of Usui and the revelation of the face behind the veil. It can't be a coincidence, can it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine

Usui’s face doesn’t change as it looks at Noiz. The eyes do not move like a human’s; they are glassy and motionless, and yet Noiz still perceives that he is being appraised, that Usui _knows_ him. It steps closer, and the encouraging hoots and hollers of the crowd recede into the distance, leaving him alone in front of the Gamemaster. Noiz falls into a kind of trance, unable to look away from the face that belongs to both Aoba and Usui.

The lights on its wrists shift gradually into a red color.

He doesn’t feel anything. There’s no flood of adrenaline in his veins, no quickening of his breathing. It is a few strides away, and each light at its wrists glows and fades like a pulse. Even though the light in the club is low, the spotlight picks out the weave of the skirt fabric, individual strands of hair, the shine of the crystal in its forehead and the veins and arteries in sharp relief around it.

_It’s not real. Usui is only a program._

Usui’s eyes are endless, the watery blue of the iris blending into the sclera. They seem to shimmer, drawing him into a trance. Noiz lingers on them, trying to figure out where the white ends and the blue begins. By the time he thinks he’s worked it out, he isn’t sure what he was trying to search for in the first place.

_It’s real. It’s something that wasn’t real but now it is._

A desire to reach out and touch Usui seizes him. Noiz sees Usui every time he can feel something, and it’s out here in the real world where he can’t feel anything. 

_If Usui is real, can he feel something? Will that be real too?_

He wants it more than anything. More than playing Rhyme, more than a real relationship with his father or seeing his brother again, more than the selfish desires that have been fueling him for years, doing as he pleases when he pleases, and making his own way in the world, needing no one. He wants it. His fingers twitch.

“Today’s first battle is between Ruff Rider and Talisman!”

The excited yell next to him blends into the congratulatory applause that’s ringing around the theatre, but it’s not enough to break the hold Usui has over Noiz.

“I’m going!” Mujina opens his Coil and then drops his Allmate over the barrier into the arena. He interrupts line-of-sight between Usui and Noiz, breaking the spell.

“You’re what?”

“Going!” Mujina repeats. Talisman is already in the arena, loosening up her limbs like a runner before a race. Mujina’s wolverine is already doing pre-fight checks as Mujina opens his Coil. Usui—

\--Noiz realizes he never saw Usui walk away from him, never perceived that it had ever left his immediate presence. Usui raises its hands and the holographic battlefield rises out of the ground, a map based on an ancient city’s ruins; he knows it well. He looks at Mujina, at the excitement on his face, the sweat that is already beginning to glisten at his temples. Mujina will get that rare palette swap of Usui to show up every time he plays Rhyme, and that kind of prestige is something that can’t be bought. It will bring Ruff Rabbit notoriety and make it easier to transition the team into a profitable venture. Ruff Rabbit being successful should make him happy.

“Rhyme START!”

It doesn’t make Noiz happy. He wants to go back to his apartment, to seal himself in until he’s figured out Usui, until he knows why the strongest Rhyme player he’s ever faced and the referee have the same face. All eyes are on the match; he steps back away from the arena’s edge, drifting through the crowd along the walls. No one will see him if he decides to duck out. He wants to just get away from the crowd and think for a moment without being in the same room as Usui.

The back hallways are dimly lit with green accent lighting, the floor covered in wall-to-wall black carpet with neon green lines that look like a wireframe. Noiz walks down one hall and finds himself faced with another one that looks exactly the same, a maze of VIP rooms and bouncers.

“Leaving so soon?”

Noiz is brought up sharply by the voice. The man’s dark suit blends into the wall next to a staircase; Noiz might have just passed him without a second thought. Unnaturally blue eyes that seem to glow in the green light glance over the rim of his glasses. Virus unfolds his arms and then inclines his head slightly. “It has been a while.”

Noiz is caught off-guard by the friendly greeting and doesn’t even think to answer Virus’ question.  

“Still playing Rhyme?” Virus prompts him.

“Obviously,” Noiz scowls.

“Your duel with Seragaki Aoba went well, I take it?”

“…well enough.”

“Good,” Virus says. His smile is nice. Not too broad, not the grimacing smile of someone who is disinterested. He is just interested enough that he looks genuinely pleased at Noiz’s answer.

A shadow obscures the light from the staircase; Trip ambles down slowly, his arms hanging by his side. Upon seeing Virus has company, his expression changes from serious to a charming smile. “Yahoo,” he says pleasantly, lifting one hand and tucking the other in his pocket. Trip’s eyes dart to Virus. Virus’ steady stare in return presses on him for more information.

“He’ll be fine if he’s alone for a few minutes,” Trip says amiably as he passes between Virus and Noiz.  Green light glints off the shiny fabric of his vest as he strolls down the hall. Virus looks after Trip with an indifferent expression. 

The pleasant mask falls back into place as Virus turns back to Noiz. “If you’ll excuse me, I am apparently needed upstairs.” Virus doesn’t touch the handrail as he goes up, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. His shoes are shined, the heels still sharp and unscuffed, and silent on the carpeted steps. Hesitating only a moment in the empty hallway, Noiz slips up the staircase after Virus.  

The upstairs hallway is done completely in black with green accent lighting. Even with the carpeting muffling his footsteps, it’s easy to track Virus as he walks down the hallway, each ghoulish uplight burnishing his blond hair to chartreuse. Noiz hangs back until he sees Virus enter a room at the end, and then he creeps down the hallway, staying close to one wall.

Not much light from the interior makes it through the slim window on the door, but there are occasional flashes; this room must face the arena. With another glance behind him, he presses his ear to the glass.

Virus is talking to someone, his voice a low hum, but no one answers him. Noiz presses his head against the door more firmly, until the sound of the blood rushing in his ear is nearly as loud as the dull thud of the speakers downstairs. But there’s still nothing, nothing but the occasional one-sided murmur weakly transmitted through the door.  

With a frown, he leans away from the door and walks a few steps away, opening his Coil. All the Rhymers in the area means there are too many chips around to get a good read on anything. The network traffic is a mess, too, even for Noiz. But the Coil network should be pretty clear in the middle of a match.

And it is; there’s not a single Coil conversation, ingoing or outgoing. 

He looks back at the door that Virus is behind, wondering who else is there with him, if it’s Toue, or if it’s Aoba, here to come out of retirement. Finding out the answer might be worth a little trouble. His sapping gloves slide onto his hands over the bandages, each of the armor plates lime-limned. He has to visually cinch the leather closed, tucking the buckles into the most well-worn holes on the straps. He closes the screens just in time to see Trip come up the stairs.

Trip flexes his hand, as if he’s just punched something. He doesn’t even register surprise at Noiz’s presence. “Did you come up here to sell us more information?”

“I told you before, I don’t need your money,” Noiz responds.

“Ah,” Trip says. He tucks his hand in his pocket, stalking back down the hall with the easy grace of a predator. The green light seems to light up his eyes, like a lion at night. They rake over Noiz, stopping at the chain of Allmates around his hips, and then they dart to the armored gloves and a grin spreads across his face.  “No, it seems not.” There is a subtle change in his body posture; his shoulders change shape, falling slightly. He approaches the door by taking a wide berth around Noiz when he could take the path directly through him.  "Shouldn't you be downstairs in the arena?"

"Maybe I don't want to."

"Oh?" Trip raps on the door with his knuckles. "A Rhymer who doesn't want to Rhyme?"

"I don't care about the cosmetic stuff."

"Didn’t say you did.” Unnatural eyes turn on Noiz, the stare piercing even with the lazy set of Trip's brow.  

Noiz lifts his chin defiantly. The door cracks and Virus, lit from behind with soft pink and purple, glances between the two of them placidly before his eyes settle on Trip.

"Oh, he's not with me," Trip says, pushing his way into the room, ducking his head slightly so he doesn't hit it on the doorframe. "We just met in the hall." He grins, but it doesn't seem warm or friendly at all; it's more like baring his fangs.  "Had a nice chat."

"Good," Virus says brusquely as he disappears back into the room's interior, leaving Trip to close the door. Their conversation is audible in the corridor, even as the door closes. "Don't forget to lock the door."

One electric blue eye slides to meet Noiz’s gaze in the hall through the narrowing crack in the door. "Eh, do I forget to do that?"

"All the time."

The bolt being thrown makes an echo in the hallway. Something about the sound makes Noiz turn away from the door, away from that abrupt note of finality.

The back alleys aren't as brightly lit as the main drag through the center of Green Playground; there's little to distinguish it from the club except the pavement and the sound of people walking and laughing on the nearby street. There are no cars here either, no drivers pulled around to the back to wait for the tournament to end. He will have to call a cab to get home.

The drive seems to take longer without Mujina's tireless enthusiasm; by the time he walks in the door of his apartment, he is deep in thought about Usui, about Aoba, about Rhyme. He drops Usagimodoki on the table in his living room and takes off most of his clothes, leaving only the black shirt and slim pants on.

"Noiz!"

"Hm?"

"Why didn't we stay in the tournament?"

Usagimodoki's voice sounds sad, but hopeful. Noiz opens his mouth, about to say that they didn't need to stay, that he wasn't interested in that skin of Usui or in the fame that would come with winning the tournament. But that wasn't entirely the truth. "I found something interesting."

"Interesting?"

"Yeah." He sits down on the couch, looking out at the darkness that covers Midorijima, at the stars nearly blotted out by light pollution from Platinum Jail. He turns his head back to Usagimodoki. "I want to figure it out."

Usagimodoki bounces in place. "Pi!"

"Bring up the data on Usui's appearances."

"What time period?"

"All of it. Since we started collecting data." Usagimodoki's face switches to an animated clock as it loads the data. Noiz stands up and goes into the kitchen, rummaging around in his refrigerator for a slice of cold pizza. It's chewy and probably needs to be thrown out, but he doesn't really have the time or inclination to order any fresh. "Plot them on a map," he orders. "Include timestamps."

"Done!"

A map screen opens up and Noiz sits down on the couch and gestures for it to grow larger and larger. Flags are planted all over Midorijima, and selecting one pops up color-coded information about the number of matches per appearance, the number of appearances per day, how close they were to predicted times. It's a glut of information, too much to parse just by looking at it.

"Show me a time lapse for all the data, one day per frame."

"Pi!"

The map erases itself and starts over, beginning when he began to collect data, almost two years ago. He overchews the pizza in his mouth, swallowing it and sitting with the crust forgotten in his hand as he watches the logged appearance pins pop up on the map. Some pop up in the Old Residents' District, some in Platinum Jail. He narrows his eyes, looking at the population, and then lifts the pizza to his mouth again.

"Remove appearances in Platinum Jail."

The map begins again as Noiz rips off some of the pizza with his teeth. He watches two years of data pile up on the map again, one day at a time.

"Change the color of the flags with each month," he says, and then frowns. "No, wait. Do it by quarter." The flags become a patchwork pattern, overlapping themselves, and yet... some of the colors almost look like they're following some kind of outline. It makes sense if Toue has a place that he wants to focus his Rhyme games, but it doesn't seem to match up to district lines, to streets, to anything he can see on a map.

"Can you compare the goodness-of-fit for our models over time on a second plot?"

"Roger!"

A new graph pops up, showing predicted and then measured values--the times that Usui was predicted to show up and the actual time when it did. Noiz looks at the scale bar across the bottom, measured in months, and then back at the line, moving jaggedly up and down around a steady black series of points, until... about three months ago. Suddenly, Noiz's model predictions began to fall much closer to observed values. Much, much closer.

"Just the appearances since three months ago." They spring up nearly anywhere, all over the Old Residents' District, looking truly random.

Noiz licks his fingers clean of grease and salt. He doesn't have to ask Usagimodoki what happened three months ago; he remembers it well. Three months ago, Aoba went into Platinum Jail and got himself lost or captured or disappeared. At the same time, Noiz's predictions for Usui got a lot more accurate.

He wipes his hands on his pants and then sighs out through his nose. "Usagi, prepare an Usui Field."

"Your vital signs are unstable!"

"Just do it!" Noiz's hands are shaking; he can see it, even if he can’t feel the cold sweat breaking out on his neck.

"Roger..." Usagimodoki says reluctantly, the emojis on its face blinking between silence and concern. Noiz accepts the match as soon as the dialog pops up, needing no time to check his Allmates or confirm a course of action for them.

"Usui," he says, before the gamemaster has even fully materialized.

"Sorry to keep you waiting--"

"Usui, you saw me tonight, didn't you? At the tournament." He reaches up to the back of his neck, where the Allmate chip is implanted just under the skin, close to the base of his skull. There's no sign that his words mean anything in this Rhyme field. "You came right up to me and looked at me. Looked me directly in the eyes. You know me, don't you?"

"--about--everyone!" The voice files glitch, and the way the words are shortened and mashed together seems eerily like an answer to Noiz's question.

"Noiz!" The rabbits gather around a screen that the lead bunny has displayed. "The timer just lost a minute!"

"You knew who I was when you saw me in that arena. You knew me because you knew this chip. You remembered me."

"--Sorry--"

"Noiz! More time has been lost!"

"You _recognize_ me, don't you?"

"--to keep--"

"To keep?" Noiz steps forward, wanting to charge toward Usui, to take hold of its arms, as if one pair of hands has any chance to subdue five. "Why? Why does a machine need to recognize my face and not just my chip? Your systems authenticate directly from the Allmate, you don't even need face or voice recognition."

"--to keep you--"

"Usui doesn't _have_ voice or face recognition." Noiz's hands tighten into fists at his sides. "That's why it changed three months ago, isn't it? Got more predictable, more like an algorithm mapped from a satellite--"

"Sixty seconds left!"

"--and less like checking all the places you'd been to find something you lost." Noiz's mouth is dry, his tongue feeling thick and useless in his mouth. "You found him. Three months ago, he went into Platinum Jail and you didn't need to look for him anymore, because you knew where Aoba was."

He waits for it, the sickening kick to his guts that comes with the word 'Aoba', but it never happens. A full five seconds passes before Noiz realizes that it won't come. He takes a step forward, and then another, moving closer and closer to Usui. He runs without even taking heed of the detection distance. Stumbling, he crosses it, into the circle beyond which he is always disconnected, beyond which he is torn out of this reality by Usui's dance and cast back into the one where he cannot feel.

But the hands and feet don't move. The dance never begins. Light around Usui seems to flare up, from a soft blue to bright gold, and there are shapes of ethereal smoke that wreathe its head and body, illuminating each wrist like jewelry.

"Forty seconds!"

It's part of the display, a graphical glitch just like the voice files and Noiz shakes his head as if he can clear it away. "Either you were not a machine before he was captured and now you are, or," he says, looking at the slender arms as they move. "Or you weren't someone before, and now you are. Am I wrong?"

Usui's eyes move to him; he can't make out their color behind the veil, only the slight tilt of the head as it changes its regard.

"You're-- What are you?"

"--Rhyme--" The distorted audio echoes in his ears. 

"You're not just Rhyme." Noiz steps closer to Usui, close enough to be within arm's reach. Usui's hands are so thin; they look gentle and cold.

"--waiting--you--" The pre-recorded voice smears together again, and this time he's close enough to see that the lips behind the veil don't move when the voice speaks. 

"Waiting for me?"

"Noiz! Fifteen seconds!"

"If you're a person, then you have a name."

Usui tilts its head again and then the light around it vanishes, as if someone has turned off the spotlight on a stage, as if a divine breath is being exhaled like a golden wind, taking all the sunlight with it. The arms, all ten of them, slowly glide down to rest at its side, and it touches down gently, heels clicking on the floor of the Rhyme field.

Noiz holds his hand out to Usui, palm up, an invitation. "What's your name?"

Usui turns its head aside briefly, and then reaches up slides one hand into Noiz's fingers. The hair, the arms, the veil, all of it is a shell, coming undone and falling like plates of armor. Each piece of Usui loses resolution as it falls, becoming just a shape, just a wireframe, just a line; the holograms disappear before they even reach the ground.

What’s left behind at the core of Usui is just a human body, like anyone else’s with two arms and two legs. The hair is deep black, like his skirt, like his pants, but the face remains the same. The lips move, and the voice that comes from them is soft, barely there, like a sigh of relief.

"Sei."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are finally getting started! Thank you so much for sticking with me through this slow build-- should be a heck of a ride from here on out!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noiz is face-to-face with Sei, and the mysterious man inside Usui makes him an offer he can't refuse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so so grateful to my betas for this chapter, Harukami and BrushDog, who both took time out of their busy schedules to help me with this chapter. Thank you both so much for your input, it improved the quality of the manuscript tremendously. 
> 
> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine

Noiz stares at the person holding his hand. The face is Aoba’s, but the longer he looks at him, the more it becomes not-Aoba’s. This face is worn and thin with slightly-sunken cheeks and chapped lips. His skin is blotchy and sallow, almost translucent.

“Usagi.” Noiz’s eyes don’t leave Sei’s face.

“Pi!”

“Leave us.”

“Noiz!”

“It’s fine.”

“… Roger.” The rabbits hop up and pop out of existence with small squares of light marking their disappearance. The server rabbit pauses for a moment. “I will watch over the apartment, pi!” At Noiz’s scant nod, it bounces out of Rhyme as well.

“Which is it? Are you a person or not?”

Sei smiles. “It depends on your definition of person.”

“What’s all this?” Noiz gestures up at the Rhyme field. “What is Usui? What is Rhyme?”

Sei’s smile falls slowly, and he walks slowly past Noiz, looking around at the Rhyme space. “This is… a means to an end.” He turns, his skirt fluffing out a little, one hand folded up against his chest. “Isn’t it?”

Noiz narrows his eyes in suspicion. “A means to an end?”

“Isn’t it?” Sei repeats. “Using Rhyme like this?”

Noiz laughs through his nose, folding his arms over his chest. “For you or for me?”

“For Toue,” Sei says, his black eyes soft and liquid. “And for both of us.”

“Toue? Both of us?”

“Am I wrong? Is Rhyme not just a means to an end for you?”

“Rhyme—“ Noiz knows what Rhyme is to him; it’s an escape from a reality that rejects him. “Rhyme is just a way to pass the time.”

“Really?” Both of Sei’s eyebrows lift slightly in surprise. “You have an awful lot of time to pass.”

“Shut up. You still haven’t answered my question. Are you Usui or a programmer or—“

“I am both Rhyme and Usui.”

“Are you an AI?” Noiz narrows his eyes. “Is that what you meant by my ‘definition of a person’?”

Sei smiles a little bit at the first question and then shakes his head, his black hair swaying. “I have known you for a very long time, Rabbit Head. Since you first logged in.” He walks back toward Noiz, carefully avoiding Noiz’s eyes; they drift over Noiz’s chest, his hands, the bandages that he wears. “I have seen you through Usui, and every Rhyme match—“

“Every match?” Noiz can’t help a sneer, but it freezes on his face as something about the profile of Sei’s face pricks his memory. He looks away, at the vastness of the Rhyme field, at the stripes of light that race through the darkness, following each other without being able to change course.

Sei reaches out and takes Noiz’s hand again, his cold fingers—they _are_ cold—pulling at the bandages. “You picked the doctor’s coat because no one would question you about the bandages. You’ve had your hands wrapped up since the first time you logged in.”

Noiz stares at him as he unwinds the bandages, looking down at the cuts and bruises being revealed. They are yellow, purple-red, bright pink, the edges puckered; some of the skin is shiny, pulled taut by fluid underneath.

“So many of them…”

“It happens,” Noiz replies.

Sei presses on them, rolling the swelling between his fingers. “They’re infected.” He gives another one a squeeze. "That doesn’t hurt?”

“It does,” Noiz says, a frown creasing his brow.

“It does, but you want it,” Sei says quietly. “Don’t you?”

Noiz says nothing, but the feeling of Sei’s hand on his is suddenly too naked, too raw, and he snatches his hand back. “It’s what I can get,” he mutters.

“What you can get…” Sei murmurs. The longer their eyes meet, the more Noiz feels compelled to break the silence.

“Out there, I can’t feel anything,” Noiz says in a low voice. “Everywhere but my tongue, it’s like being wrapped in a thick blanket. But in Rhyme, I can feel…everything.” He rubs his fingers together, looking at his hand moving and feeling, able to touch fingertips together and feel the give of his skin. He presses them together more, and his fingers slide in fits and starts as his fingerprints catch on each other. He catches the slightly sad look on Sei’s face. “It doesn’t matter to you anyway.” Noiz folds his arms over his chest. “I get by well enough on my own.”

Sei’s eyes stray to the bandages, and understanding crosses his face in a wave. He lowers his eyes to the floor before looking back up at Noiz. “You want it, don’t you? The ability to feel?”

“What?”

“To be normal?”

Noiz narrows his eyes. “Why?”

“I can give that to you.”

Noiz snorts a laugh. “Even if you’re a computer, there’s no way you can—“

“I can, Noiz.” There is steel in Sei’s quiet words; he is confident in his understanding of the situation, confident in his abilities.

Something like this seems too good to be true. In his long experience of using other people and being used, those things that seem too good to be true usually are. “What do you get out of it?”

Sei blinks for a moment and then a slow, secretive smile spreads over his face. “Why would you think I would get anything out of it?”

“Because you don’t just give things away like that for free.”

“Things like what?” Sei sways closer to Noiz, invading his personal space with demure expression, half-lidded eyes and parted lips.

“Like…” Noiz hesitates just for a moment, but that’s all the opening Sei needs. His hand is firm as he pulls Noiz down into a kiss.

Noiz makes an initial attempt to keep the suspicious set of his jaw, to remain close-lipped. But Sei’s hand slips up along his jaw, and for once, Noiz can feel it. Those cool fingertips raise gooseflesh on his neck and he lets out a small sigh of longing. His body arches forward, seeking here in Rhyme what it is denied in the real world: pleasure, contact. Connection.

Noiz is not good at the games that Sei plays with his lips, clumsily trying to mimic what Sei does without the benefit of experience in feeling it done correctly. What he lacks in technique he makes up for with enthusiasm, wrapping his arm around the small of Sei’s back.

Sei tugs at Noiz’s lips with his teeth, his lips plucking smaller kisses as they embrace. The line of pressure from Sei’s incisors awakens a greater lust in Noiz and he opens his mouth greedily, pushing his tongue between Sei’s lips. He takes Sei’s breath away, forcing him to throw an arm around Noiz’s neck. By the time Sei turns his head aside, forcing the kiss to break, Noiz is already panting.

“You’re hard.” Sei states it so plainly that Noiz replies just as plainly.

“It’s just a physiological reaction.”

“Over a kiss,” Sei retorts playfully, his arm slipping from Noiz’s shoulders. His voice drops conspiratorially, as if they have been doing something they shouldn’t, playing around with Noiz’s ability to feel in Rhyme. “But it’s a kiss you really felt. It’s good, right?”

Noiz frowns, letting Sei step away even as he watches him lustily, eyeing the tongue that darts out to moisten his kiss-swollen lips. Even as he wants sensation, craves it, the carrot is rarely worth the stick. “It’s okay.” Sei glances down at the bulge in Noiz’s pants and then looks back up at him, and Noiz’s lips twist in an angry pout. “I don’t need it.”

“Need—“

“It— _I_ —will be fine.”

“Until you aren’t,” Sei counters in a firmer voice. “It’s been harder for you to spend time outside of Rhyme lately, hasn’t it? And things are changing now in Usui’s algorithm—“

“Isn’t that your fault?” Noiz levels a challenging stare at Sei.

The expression on Sei’s face is barely a smile, more like a grimace of acknowledgment under Noiz’s scrutiny. “If you want to think so.”

“You can change the algorithm, can’t you?” Resignation settles over Sei’s features before Noiz presses him further. “Can’t you?” 

“I can’t stop the changes that are coming. Neither can you. It’s larger than both of us.”

Noiz scoffs and then turns away, pacing through the Rhyme field. He stops and turns back after a few paces, the furrow in his brow deepening as he scuffs his feet across the floor.

“It doesn’t have to be difficult for you,” Sei says gently.

“You said you couldn’t stop it.”

“I can’t stop the inevitable.” Sei looks solemn, like a man who has made his peace with this world and his place in it. A ribbon of purple light moves through the darkness in Sei’s eyes, lightning rolling through black clouds.

Sensing the shift in tone, Noiz narrows his eyes. When Sei begins walking toward him, he takes a step back. “I don’t want your pity.”

The light in Sei’s eyes flickers and Noiz realizes too late that his apprehension is melting away, that his reluctance is crumbling. Just like Usui, Sei doesn’t blink as he walks toward Noiz. Just like Usui, Sei’s eyes shimmer, like air above asphalt.  There is nothing that Noiz wants to do more than take his hand. His fingers twitch.

“Noiz.” The name is a declaration, not a request.

Noiz opens his mouth, but the suspicion and distrust brewing behind his lips vanishes. Without a sound he watches Sei come closer and closer. When Sei’s chilled fingers slide into his, Noiz lifts his hand to meet them.

_Can I quit yet?_

_No._

Noiz doesn’t need to look at them to know that the chains around his wrists and ankles are there, as they always have been. Darkness stretches away from him in every direction, deep and impenetrable except for a narrow crack of light under a door.

There is nothing else to look at except for his chains. So he simply stares at the door, hoping and waiting.

A pair of brogues the color of cognac walks up to the door; the plush carpet springs back under their step. Noiz’s heart stumbles over itself. The shoes pause just for a moment, for a fraction of a second, and then continue past the door. His heart continues beating.

“Your father?”

The voice is like that of a dove, delicate and easily crushed. He wants to turn his head to look, to see who is in here with him after he has been alone for so long. He doesn’t want to look; he is afraid of what he will see.

_Not Theo. Don’t lock Theo in here._

He doesn’t look but he is looking anyway.

It’s not Theo. A svelte body the color of chalk, with black markings round and full over his arms, his legs, his chest. His eyes are the palest blue, blending into the whites of his eyes, lost against the white of his hair. His face is so strangely familiar, even if the sincerity in his expression makes Noiz uneasy.

_Usui? Sei._

Noiz lets his eyes drift back to the crack under the door. It doesn’t change anything. "Yes, my father."

"Do you want to see him?"

"Yes. No," Noiz says, turning his face and tucking it into his forearm. "I don't know."

"You love him." Sei's tone is quiet but perceptive. "And despise him."

"I..."

"It's okay to do both."

Noiz's fingers scratch against the floor; the links of chain clatter against each other. No matter what happens, he is a prisoner in his own body. He can never escape.

“No," Noiz spits, rage twisting his features as he pushes against his arm until he can feel it. He keeps one eye on the ribbon of light under the door.

“This is what Rhyme is to you. A means to an end.”

"No, don't act like you understand." The space around him is thick with turmoil, a maelstrom of angry words. They crawl across him, many-legged centipedes of disapproval, leaving behind thick trails of disgust and loathing. Sei watches them placidly.

“How could anyone understand?” Bitter tears well up in his eyes; the loathing dissolves into his skin, staining him in contempt and apathy. “I’m alone, I’m alone...” Noiz chokes on the words, the shine of the light under the door trembling through his tears. He blinks and the glimmer drains away, leaving nothing but darkness. He picks up his head, peering into the void, hoping that the light will come back on, that he can see something, anything. But Sei's pale figure is nowhere to be seen, leaving nothing but the gloom to press in around him.

He puts his head back down, giving the door another look before closing his eyes. Time becomes meaningless and the abyss presses in on him until he isn’t sure whether his eyes are closed or open.

Sei doesn't reappear; Noiz just becomes aware of him again, like one realizes someone else is in the room without knowing when they entered it. It's not a comfort to him when he recognizes the huddled figure against the wall; it's an irritant. It is the nature of being caught up in his own world that he doesn’t spare much thought for those that aren't part of it. So he says nothing and time passes. He looks to see if Sei is still there and he is, white and gleaming and huddled up with himself just out of reach.

_Are you real?_

Noiz stretches out one manacled hand toward Sei. A sweeping blade of darkness blots out Sei's white hair for a moment and then a sharp pain sears his arm. He snatches it back, clutching at his wrist and finding only a bloody stump. He clenches his teeth, screaming behind them. Confusion sweeps him away; despite the loss of his hand, the pain is exhilarating.

A small voice, like that of a child, calls to him in German. It's familiar, almost intimate, but in a way that makes him shudder with fear and revulsion. White noise and static fill his ears, drowning out the words in a meaningless roar. He closes his eyes again, losing himself in the throb of blood pouring out of his wrist.

Bleeding, the edges of himself begin to blend into the chains, into the floor. The emptiness becomes him, and he is made of nothing. He waits in chains for the light beyond the door to turn on, he waits to see Theo's feet stop outside it. He keeps company with the emptiness, as if waiting will give him purpose, as if solitude will provide clarity. He waits to stop bleeding, but it never happens. After a while, he's not unhappy about it. It’s still warmth to comfort him, even if he can only get it like this. 

The light under the door stays off.

He wants to see the light come on. He wants to hear Theo’s footsteps, or the heavy tread of his father’s feet coming down the hall. Glancing at Sei, he sees that nothing has changed, that he is as he has been. It is a bland succor, simply having something else to rest his eyes on in this endless pit, but even this is a relief.

Noiz reaches out again, pushing his other hand through the congealing pool of his own blood; he can feel it, smell it more than see it. Darkness again obscures his vision and pain lances through his arm; he howls as his other hand is taken. Sei remains passive, his hair fallen over his face.

Fire and ice surge through his body, wracking it with tremors, every nerve crackling with electricity. He pulls his arms back, shivering and hugging them against his chest. The irons around his wrists slide and roll in his blood. His eyes naturally fall upon Sei, and even though Sei has done nothing to help him, he has not left, either. He is always present, locked with him inside this prison of a body.

Noiz is not alone.

“Sei,” Noiz says brokenly. “It hurts.” One of the shackles catches against the bone and without thinking Noiz pushes it off, grimacing as it plucks at the ragged ends of his arms. It falls to the floor with a heavy clank and then vanishes in a hiss of black smoke.

When Noiz looks at Sei again, he is standing, swaying on his feet and reaching for Noiz with an expression of resolve. It is a face that says he has done so much and now he must do that much again and more.  But it is not hatred or disgust or disappointment, and Noiz is in no condition to unravel the veils of meaning in Sei’s eyes.

Noiz groans as he tries to sling the other manacle off his severed wrist, panting at the pain that has his entire body trembling. It sails into the black void, leaving a decaying trail of sanguine soot.

He reaches out again to Sei and Sei is _there_ , standing beautiful and tall so that Noiz must tip his head back to look at him. Without words, his long white fingers close around the bones of Noiz’s wrist and he pulls them away. A light in the shape of a hand grows from Sei’s fingertips as he withdraws them, so pure and hot that Noiz thinks he must be on fire again.

But there is no fire: only flesh, only fingers, only skin, created out of Sei’s touch.

His feet twist and yaw in the blood on the floor, and Noiz touches the chains around them, steel so thick he thought he could never leave. They slacken and fall away, crumbling like brittle leaves. He stands up, feeling numbness and knives all through his legs, and Sei slides his hand down to Noiz’s other mangled wrist.

“This one, too.” With a sterile smile, Sei encloses it in his steepled fingers, in his sincere wish, and pulls forth brilliance from Noiz’s bones in the shape of a hand. The darkness is banished by the fullness of this compassion, by the intensity of this light.

Everything goes white.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sei makes a request and Mujina delivers an ultimatum. With his nascent ability to feel and Rhyme connections in tatters, Noiz must choose a path forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> tracked tag: #tigerine
> 
> I'm so grateful to harukami and BrushDog for their assistance in beta and in discussions and encouragement with this chapter. They are fantastic writers and wonderful friends to me. 
> 
> This chapter overlaps with some of the events in Carry That Weight, and I was really excited to be able to look at them from Noiz's perspective this time, instead of Mink and Clear's perspectives. There's a different feeling on Noiz's end and I'm glad I finally get to show it to you.

“You did something to me.”

“Yes.” Sei’s voice is merely a breath, a hiss in the Rhyme field.

“What… did you do?” Noiz flexes his fingers, looking down at his hands, one still bandaged, the other naked, puckered scabs bending awkwardly around his joints.

“Why don’t you find out for yourself?” Sei’s long lashes flutter down and his lips curve in a faint smile.

“Because I don’t like playing games. I didn’t even want… whatever it was.” He holds a hand to his head. It hurts, and he can’t shake the sensation of something moving inside his skull, like his brain is flipping over and rearranging itself, like something is churning through his mind and leaving confusion in its wake. He closes his eyes to try to make the world right and then opens them again.

“Are you sure about that?” Sei sways slightly from side to side, looking at Noiz.

“You—“ Noiz lifts his head. “You’re just a computer. Or a person. Or both.” He puts his hand to his head again, surprised at how much pain is being transmitted through Rhyme without any Allmates to deal it.

Sei’s hands flatten against his thighs, and the gesture seems familiar, like he’s a child who is trying not to seem like he is resisting, when even a hand gathered into a fist might be insubordination. “I’m a person, Noiz. Someone who needs you very much.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s not a joke.” Sei tilts his head. “There’s no one else.”

Even through his headache, Noiz hears it, the name that Sei doesn’t speak: Aoba. “Did he die?”

Confusion flashes across Sei’s face before he, too, hears what Noiz hasn’t said. “No. He’s beyond my reach, but he isn’t dead.”

“Sitting in Oval Tower, then?”

Sei’s lashes flutter as if he’s holding back tears. “In a manner of speaking.”

“If you’re doing things like this, you don’t need anything from me.”

“On the contrary,” Sei says wistfully, “there is something I need you to do that I cannot do for myself.”

“And what’s that?”

“I need you to find this body and kill it.”

A breath passes his lips, in and out, where he thinks he’s misheard, but Sei’s face remains intent, his black eyes unwavering. “Oh, just a murder, is that all,” Noiz retorts mockingly, trying to pass through the feeling of his brain overturning like boiling water, mixing itself.  “That’ll be no problem. I bet you’re just sitting somewhere waiting for it, too. No guards or anything.”

“That can be arranged.”

Silence presses in on them; Noiz narrows his eyes. “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

Sei stares at him indifferently. “Maybe,” he mutters, “It would be good for you to realize what you’ve gained.”

“What I’ve--!”

The Rhyme field around him warps, spitting Noiz back out into his living room, dark but for the flicker of LEDs reflecting off the wall behind his computers. Noiz retches, but it’s nothing but dry heaves; his stomach has been empty since before the Rhyme tournament.

“Usagi.”

“Pi!”

“How long were we in,” he pants flatly, unable to make it even sound like a question when he feels like his stomach is inside-out against the back of his teeth.

“After you dismissed me, you remained in the Rhyme field for forty-five minutes!”

Forty-five minutes. He lets his forehead rest against the floor, drool smeared over his lips as he swallows down the feeling of his gorge rising again and again. Soon it will be over. Soon he’ll be back to feeling nothing at all.

But relief that doesn’t come. Waves of electricity break over his skin, covering him in current that arcs from nerve to nerve, like a circuit that has always been open is now closed. Everything seems to trigger it—the pressure from the floor, the itch of his hair against the nape of his neck, the feeling of his dry, cracked lips. He crawls to the bathroom, hanging his head over the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl, closing his eyes and hoping that at least the nausea will subside.

“Noiz…”

The clatter of Usagimodoki hopping into the bathroom makes Noiz open his eyes. His breathing is regular, heavy and exaggerated, neither speeding up nor slowing down. Breathing like this quiets the unrest in the pit of his stomach, until at last he feels like he’s not going to die.

_It will be good for you to realize what you’ve gained._

Emoji flash across Usagimodoki’s face, questioning and apprehensive.

“What kind of data did you get?”

“Data…”

“Yeah, proxies, time-to-live values, anything,” Noiz says in a faint voice, trying to push himself up off the floor and finding that he is too weak with illness to move. After a moment’s struggle, the toilet doesn’t seem like such a bad place to rest his still-throbbing head just for a while.

“Usui’s connection comes from Toue Incorporated.”

“I know that, but where is it?” Noiz shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “He. Where is…” With a frown he looks at the small Allmate and then lifts his head and shakes it, trying to clear it. “Sei. Where was Sei connecting from?”

Usagi pauses for a moment. “There was no change in the signal source between the time you called Usui and the time you were ejected from the Rhyme field!”

“So he really is Usui.” Shifting his head on the toilet seat sent new waves of sensation skittering through his nerves like hyperactive spiders. “His body must be under Toue’s control too.”

“Pi?”

Noiz all but slithers into the shower, wrestling with his shirt and pants, like a snake shedding its skin. He doesn’t even take off his underwear before turning on the shower. It has never mattered before what temperature the water was, but suddenly it matters a great deal; frigid water soaks through the thin, white fabric of his briefs, plastering them to his skin. Shivering, he gasps at the drumming of water on his skin, the pressure mixed in with the needling of his nerves. His feet drag against the rug outside the shower as he pushes himself up against the wall, moaning and shuddering at the cold.

“Noiz?”

“I’m okay,” Noiz mumbles. “He did something to me. Sei did.”

“Pi!” Alarmed emojis scroll across Usagimodoki’s face.

Water drips off the end of Noiz’s nose, and he reaches up and rubs his face, able to feel the rough weave of the gauze scrubbing over his skin. He looks at his hands, watching the water soak through the bandages. Slowly he unwinds them, letting them coil in a limp, soggy pile on the floor of the shower. The cuts under his bandages are still infected, still red and warm with inflammation, and the cold water on them feels good.

He breathes out. It feels good. Noiz smiles and lets his head fall back against the wall of the shower with a loud thud. “Ow!”  His teeth chatter as he begins to chuckle. He giggles to himself in the bathroom, and then outright laughter bubbles up out of his lips, hoarse and unpracticed. He laughs so hard his cheeks ache, until his stomach is sore, until his throat is tight and he’s nearly wheezing. Nineteen years of relief begin streaming down his cheeks, hot tears that quickly chill in the shower spray.

A fist beats against his front door, followed by a muffled shout. “Noiz!”

Noiz sits up straighter and looks down at himself, soaked and chilled to the bone, and then nods at Usagi. “Open the door for him.”

Usagimodoki dutifully bounces out of the bathroom and a moment later, he hears the door open after the electronic bolt is disengaged.

“Where is Noiz?”

“In the bathroom!”

“Noiz—“ Mujina tears down the hall but stops in the doorway, an expression of frustration melting into wary concern as he stares at Noiz all but naked under the cold water spray. “Are… are you fucked up?”

“Nah,” Noiz says, reaching out an arm that seems leaden and shutting off the water. He doesn’t make any move to get up.

“You left the tournament.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t even compete.”

“It was random pool and I wasn’t picked,” Noiz lies. He gets to his feet slowly, holding on to the wall. The nausea is mostly gone, and the weakness along with it. 

“That’s not what I mean.” Mujina frowns, watching Noiz step out of the shower, dripping over the pile of clothes on the floor.

“Did you win?”

Mujina grabs a towel and throws it at Noiz, keeping his eyes averted. “It was hard, but yeah. Talisman’s good.” He watches Noiz towel off, the way he winces as he pats gently at his skin and then gives up, just wrapping himself in his towel. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Noiz starts to nod as he tucks the towel into itself around his hips and then he glances up at Mujina, at his face, frowning.

“What?”

“You keep asking that.”

Mujina scowls. “Because you keep acting like you need it.” Noiz walks out to his bedroom while Mujina trails after him like an agitated puppy.

“I keep doing the work, don’t I?” Noiz snaps, reaching into his dresser and pulling out some rumpled clothes.

“Yeah, but what’s going on? I haven’t seen you in weeks before tonight and you drop me the first chance you get.”

Noiz tugs a shirt on over his head, saying nothing. Explaining what happened when he looked at Usui, the two blonds, and the subsequent…whatever that was that happened when he got home—it’s too much trouble.

Mujina ducks his head slightly, trying to read Noiz’s emotional state, and when it’s not obvious, he just continues talking. “Usually when people leave the Rhyme scene it’s because they found something better. Job, kids, whatever. You’re just… rotting away in here.”

“I’m not rotting away,” Noiz protests.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” Noiz shoves his sodden underwear off, stepping into a dry pair and leaving the wet ones in a growing puddle on the floor. “I’ve never been better.”

Mujina gives him an incredulous look. The rustle of fabric fills the quiet between them, seeming louder and louder with each breath, the lull in conversation less like a moment of reflection and more like a lifted axe, ready to fall.

“They offered me a sponsorship,” Mujina blurts out after watching Noiz step into a pair of pants.

“Who did?”

“Toue.”

The name sends a chill through Noiz’s already cold body, making his hair stand on end. He smooths the long black sleeves over his arms to dispel the gooseflesh. His voice sounds oddly distant in his own ears. “Congratulations.”

“Not just me. The whole team. They want to…” Mujina says self-consciously, sliding his thumb nervously between his middle and index fingers. “We’ll be an official team.”

“Official?” Noiz snorts. This feeling is new, this half-twisted bunching of his lungs in his chest that won’t let him breathe in deeply.

“I’ve accepted already.” Mujina forges ahead and his shoulders sag slightly, like weight has been lifted off of him. Ruff Rabbit being profitable, even lucrative, is suddenly real.

“You accepted.” Noiz parrots, wrinkling his nose at the taste of bile in the back of his throat. “They offered you something like that on a whim and you accepted it without even talking to me?”

“We’ve—“ Mujina shakes his head and begins again. “I’ve been talking to them for weeks. They wanted to know what we’d been doing to predict Usui’s appearances.”

“And you told them?” Noiz straightens his shirt and stalks out into his living room. “You told them what I’d been doing?”

“Yes.”

“How much?” Noiz hasn’t ever felt this before, indignation boiling his blood, anger heating him to a fever pitch. “How much did they promise you?” 

“Does it matter? Money doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“How much, Mujina?”

“Enough.” Mujina’s shoulders square up and he shoves his hands in his pockets, a sulky pout around his lips. “More than enough.”

“Is everyone going to benefit or just you?”

“Noiz, I’ve been running the team for almost three months while you pursued whatever the fuck it was you were doing. Every time we uploaded predictions, people wanted to join the team. Of course Toue would notice us. I wanted to make sure it was going to be good for everyone.”

“You didn’t have to _tell_ them anything! Did you volunteer it or did you at least wait until they paid you?”

Mujina sighs softly. “Noiz, it’s not like that.”

“Tell me what it’s like, then.” Noiz folds his arms over his chest, eyes like daggers.

Mujina’s eyes are distrustful, sliding back to Noiz’s face as if they want to avoid seeing him at all. “You programmed the predictions, right?”

“What?”

“You made simulations every week, right?”

“Where else would I get the data, Mujina?”

“They’re _really_ accurate for someone who doesn’t have insider information.”

“Who sold you that line?” Noiz sneers. “You know I’m the best programmer in Midorijima! _Everyone_ knows I’m the—“ He’s halfway through the sentence before his thoughts coalesce into a realization that makes the room spin. He puts his hand on the end of the bed and sits down slowly. His anger drains away, replaced by a clammy, cold feeling on the back of his neck, sliding unpleasantly down his spine. “Toue did.” He looks up at Mujina, and there’s some sympathy to be found in his blue eyes. “Toue told you I was just selling their data tables. Anyone else and you’d have _known_ it was a lie.”

Mujina looks down at his feet.

“Do you believe it?”

“Not really,” Mujina mumbles. “I’ve never known you to be a liar.”

Noiz folds his hands together in his lap, feeling an uncomfortable pressure in his chest, like something inside him is being crushed in a fist that won’t stop closing.  

“You can’t keep doing Drive-bys or anything with Usui.”

Noiz snorts softly. “Is that an order from Toue?”

There’s a faint air of derision on Mujina’s face that wasn’t there before, certainly not when he was helping Noiz to figure out the best way to program a Drive-by, to pluck Usui out of the code. “No,” Mujina pulls out his lighter and starts to snap it open and closed, like the ticking of a clock. “Both of those things are against the user agreement, so they _should_ ban you. But they said they can look the other way on data collection as long as everything else you do is above-board.”

It’s an order from Toue.

Noiz’s eyes flick up to Mujina and then he looks away again. “I need time to think about it,” he says under his breath.

Mujina slips the lighter back in his pocket and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Think about it?”

“I’m….” Noiz scowls, because he doesn’t know how to describe the cocktail of chemicals surging through his bloodstream, making his heart beat faster, curling his hands into fists even as he can’t meet Mujina’s eyes. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand what’s happened to you over the last couple of months, but…”Mujina’s voice is slightly pleading, imploring him to accept the terms. “Just… do what they want, Noiz.”

Noiz doesn’t respond and after a moment, Mujina shoves his hands in his pockets again and slumps out of the doorway. The sound of the front door closing is heavy.

Noiz stares at the half-assembled computers that litter the floor of his bedroom, old keyboards on top of bare metal chassis, upside-down jar lids full of screws, and screwdrivers put aside in the middle of one task or another.

His predictions weren’t going to continue much longer anyway; someone else was going to discover the planned rate of decay and undercut their information brokering. Noiz mentally goes through his finances quickly, calculating how much longer he can stay here if he loses his income from Ruff Rabbit.

Four months if he’s careful. Four months at the most before he’d have to find some way to make money or go back to Germany, accepting his father’s Draconian rules and censure at best, and ending up destitute or dead at worst. Four months, during which time he’d have to accept whatever that broadcast song does, whatever those strange lights do, and he wonders if it’s really that bad if Mujina’s been bathing in it and he seems okay. Well, ‘okay’ is a relative term. 

His Coil makes a sound in the bathroom, a diminutive beep to let him know he has a message. He wants to leave it alone, but it might be Mujina rethinking things, or maybe something, anything to show him a way to slip the noose tightening around his neck. He’s scuffing his way into the bathroom and fishing it out of the pile of clothes before he knows it.

_One (1) message from Captive Princess._

Noiz fastens the Coil around his wrist again with a sigh. “Is that what you’re calling yourself?”

The subject line reads _Fw: Re: MEMORANDUM: Summit in Hong Kong_. Noiz’s eyes scan it quickly, picking out dates and departure times for Toue’s private jet, his entourage, his bodyguards, the establishment of a skeleton crew in Oval Tower—but no mention of Aoba or Sei.

“So this is when you want it to happen. Two weeks.” Noiz rubs the back of his neck, flinching as his hand drags over his piercings. “No wonder you’re so desperate,” he mutters. “Two weeks is not a lot of time to figure out how I’m going to get in there.” The echo of his words in the bathroom hasn't even faded before another message arrives, containing a schematic for Platinum Jail’s Wall with points of entry, street maps to Oval Tower, and then a map and directory for Oval Tower itself. Pursing his lips, he closes the screens.

Noiz lowers his arm, walking into his living room and falling upon the couch. Dawn is already staining the horizon grey-pink, the pebbled leather presses his thin shirt against him and a pleasurable shiver runs through his body. Two weeks. He rests his arm over his forehead, the weave of his shirt pressing into his skin. He drifts off into a dreamless sleep where two weeks is eaten up in the time of a sunrise.

When he sits up, it’s nearly ten o’clock, and he walks to his balcony, opening the door and stepping out into the morning.

The sun warms his skin and in the shade, the wind is cooling, almost cold. His hair tosses about in the breeze and tickles his cheekbones, hanging on his eyelashes. He lifts a hand to brush it away and looks at his Coil again before starting a call on an encrypted channel.

“Hey.”

“Maniac,” Mink replies, and his voice is not as gruff as Noiz remembers it.

“I’m not a maniac,” Noiz returns.

“You must have some reason for calling me. Especially since this Coil address is unpublished and I didn’t give it to you.”

It’s true, but getting information isn’t any rare feat for Noiz. “Just a bit of information I acquired that might be of interest to you.” He pulls up the messages from Sei, downloading the wall’s engineering schematics and the information about Toue’s absence, only glancing up when he sees Mink’s furtive looks out of view of his Call. “Don’t worry, this channel is secure.”

“I won’t discuss anything over Coil.”

Noiz lifts an eyebrow almost imperceptibly. “We’re not going to discuss anything.” He prepares the file transfers for the memo and then the schematic, making sure he sends originals so Mink can see that he’s serious.

There’s a small commotion on the other end of the call and then an all-too-familiar gas mask enters the field of vision and Noiz has to hold back a snort as Clear greets him effusively. “Oh! Noiz-san! How are you?”

Noiz glances at Mink’s face. At least from an information broker’s standpoint, there are more interesting things than just Clear’s presence: that white-gloved hand curves over Mink’s shoulder, almost intimately, like Mink’s prickly disposition doesn’t even affect him. “Taking in strays?”

Mink is obviously tolerant of Clear’s invasions of his personal space, if not exactly thrilled. “Do you have anything useful?”

“Regarding that matter you asked me to look into, I’ve found him.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” A screen on Noiz’s Coil pops up, alerting him to a change in his call’s routing. It now passes through another node, and he recognizes one of the relays as a Rhyme server. He sets a tracing routine on it, although he has a feeling that this re-routing isn’t by accident.

“Where did you say you got this information?” Suspicion fairly drips off of Mink’s words.

The Rhyme server resolves back to Oval Tower. Noiz’s eyes lift up, looking into the bright sky and the gleaming spire of Oval Tower within Platinum Jail. “A reliable source.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Take your time checking it out if you want. I’ll wait.”

“I won’t waste my time. I’m spread too thin as it is.”

Being able to feel the way his body reacts is so new that he’s not really prepared for the way irritation feels, like a tightening of his brows and a curl of his lip. “I don’t understand you. I’m giving you exactly what you want.”

“Or giving Toue exactly what he wants.”

“And that is?”

“My head.”

The night’s revelations force a sharp laugh out of Noiz, but he isn’t trying hard to keep it back. “You really have no idea, do you? He’s already got everything he wants. You’re nothing but a fly to him.”

“Noiz-san! Did you find Master?”

“You idiot, not over an open Coil—“

Clear is just as excitable as he always was. Seeing Mink next to him, it’s obvious what’s happened to Mink’s gruff nature under _that_ kind of onslaught. Glancing between the two of them as they bicker gives the impression of a married couple to Noiz and he hides the curve of his lips in a squint at the sun until he can get it under control. “I already told you, this channel is secure.” Mink doesn’t seem convinced, so Noiz prints a list of listening nodes, including the Rhyme server and sends that across the call.

“What’s this?”

“A list of people listening to our conversation.”

“What are you trying to pull? There are three entries.”

“One of them is my source,” Noiz explains patiently. “The other two are me and you.”

That’s good enough for Clear, who begins thanking him candidly. He’s more surprised to hear Clear thank ‘Source-san’. Noiz looks down at the network address of the Rhyme server, hoping Sei heard that. 

“So what’s your price for this, maniac?”

Noiz looks back at Mink’s stern face on the call, still feeling the sun warm on his face. “No charge.”

“Bullshit.”

“Just owe me one.”

“I don’t like owing anyone favors.”

“Mink-saaan!”

“Fine! Send it over and I’ll see if I can do anything with it.”

Noiz sighs; _good luck with that one, Clear_. The screen blinks; the Rhyme server listening to their conversation disconnects. Sei heard enough. It’s just one keystroke to complete the handshake and transfer the files.

“Oi, maniac.”

“What?”

“There are two files here. What’s this other one for?”

The engineering schematics, which include materials strengths, load-bearing walls, service corridors, and mechanical access. It’s not strictly necessary for his purposes; obviously Sei furnished it to him to show him how to sneak into Platinum Jail from the Old Residents’ District. But given Mink’s tendency toward violence and his history of attacking Toue’s infrastructure, there’s a most likely outcome.

“That one is on the house,” Noiz says. “If you can make use of it, then please do.”

When the call is over, he stays out on his balcony with his eyes closed, his hands wrapped around the sun-warmed railing, letting the ocean breeze whip through his hair.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With his promise to Sei weighing heavy on his mind, Noiz sets out for Oval Tower on the morning Toue leaves for Hong Kong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, It's not an April Fool's, I really have updated. Thank you so much for being patient with me as I dealt with real-life stuff.

Two weeks later, Noiz stands on the balcony of his apartment, watching the walls of Platinum Jail turn golden-white in the dawn. A few sparrows zip through the air in front of him, but he doesn’t pay attention to where they came from or where they’re going. His fingers tighten on the railing in front of him.

“Noiz! It is time to leave!”

“I know,” he replies. Every dread, every hope, every piece of his plan that fell into place as the days went by has led him to this sunrise.

Usagimodoki hops over to the edge of the balcony. “Are you having second thoughts, pi?”

Noiz steps back, looking down at his Allmate. “No,” he says, but that’s a lie. Every time he’s discovered something wonderful—the comfortable drowsiness of a full belly, the wicked pleasure of masturbating at noon—the plan to infiltrate Platinum Jail has a counterstroke. Sleepless night after sleepless night, the burn of acid in his throat, the existence of tension headaches that begin in his neck when he thinks of wrapping his hands around a slender white throat and crushing the life out of it. There is still the problem of managing security, but if the information Sei provided is correct, it won’t be much of a problem for long. He picks up his Allmates, attaching them to his hips and making sure they are chained together, all of their processing power available to Usagimodoki when it needs it.

He slips out of his apartment, locking it behind him with his Coil, as if he is only going to the market, or stepping out to get some air. His sallow skin warms to the morning sun, and he stops for a moment, watching it move in shadows over his knuckles. Even after two weeks of daily miracles, he still finds wonder in the hollows of his hand.

This early in the morning, the roads are quiet; he keeps his eyes downcast, avoiding the screens and advertising. Cabs idle at the stand, waiting for fares to take to work. Not all of them are cleared to go into Platinum Jail, but just one has the medallion on it with Oval Tower’s silhouette. Noiz slides into the back seat after the driver opens the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Green Playground.”

The driver turns to look at Noiz through the cabin divider, his mouth open to say something, but the black look on Noiz’s face encourages him to keep his trap shut.

The expressway glitters in the morning light, streetlamps flying past nearly as fast as the irritated tapping of Noiz’s heel against the floorboard. They pass through the tunnel in the wall around Platinum Jail; the sodium-orange lights flicker over the cab’s windows, pulsing at twice the rate of the Rhyme field. Noiz checks his Coil. It is just past eight thirty in the morning when he looks out on the artificial night.

“Don’t get many people coming into Platinum Jail,” the driver ventures. His question looms in the quiet of the noise-shielded cab.

“I can pay your toll, if you’re worried.” Noiz snaps.

“No,” the man says, smiling and looking up in the rearview mirror to meet Noiz’s eyes. “It’s just unusual.”

There is suggestion in the cab driver’s voice, an invitation to soothe his suspicions about a young man going into Platinum Jail alone in the morning. A streetlight overhead is out; the cab pushes through the extended darkness alone. The false stars in Platinum Jail’s simulated darkness twinkle.

“It’s not unusual,” Noiz retorts. “I play Rhyme.”

“Ah,” the man chuckles. “You kids and your games. Waste of money if you ask me.” His smiling eyes drop back to the road and do not look up again until the cab slows to a crawl under neon green lights. The meter in the cab ticks up and up, and jumps with the admission to Platinum Jail. The driver keeps a practiced look of disinterest in Noiz’s financial details as the transaction finishes. After a moment, the terminal in the back of the cab glows blue; his payment has been accepted. “Save enough for your fare back,” the driver remarks, opening the door with the lever next to his seat. “It’s a long walk home from here.”

Noiz shuts the cab door without answering.

Green Playground glitters like a knife edge, every shape round with neon or sharp with hard lighting. Someone nearby laughs, and the sound shrinks into an alleyway that is streaked with LED chaser lights. The screens overhead announce a Rhyme match to be held in the alley arena in two hours. Something to consider.

He looks away, walking down the main drag toward Oval Tower, presiding over a cyberpunk fantasy. Noiz looks up at the beams that fall from the crown of the tower, arching gracefully down to the ground. One of the dozens of screens nearby flashes briefly, brightly. Flinching, Noiz looks at it before he can stop himself.

“Welcome to Platinum Jail, a unique world tailored to your request. Please let our staff cater to your every desire.” The woman’s voice is soft and alluring. Relaxation melts into his mind, despite knowing what he’s about to do. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shakes off the warm, comfortable indolence that is settling into his bones, and keeps his eyes directed at the ground until he’s very near Oval Tower. Looking up at it, he scowls.

“Now I have to play guessing games…” He checks his Coil and then begins to circle around the base of the tower, slouching his way through the large walks and public fountains to the service entrance of Oval Tower, opening on Black Valley. Perhaps Toue is a theatrical man who likes to leave from his own front door, but perhaps he is a controlling, meticulous man who leaves no detail to chance.

Perhaps he is both.

Skulking across the manicured lawns, he pulls a small device out of his pocket, stripping away an adhesive liner. Thin and white, it sticks perfectly over the card reader that allows access to the service entrance; any card that slides through it will unlock the door as normal, but the card’s information will be skimmed on the way out. Even if it’s detected after the fact, short-distance transmission will make sure it does its job. He crouches near the bushes to wait.

A long black car crawls up to the curb, parking lights glowing in the morning-blue shadow of Oval Tower. The door opens at the same time, and a commanding voice says, “Just take the bags out there.”

Noiz does his best to melt into the foliage as two employees carry out several pieces of luggage on hand trucks. Some are a matched set in a dark plaid with brass hardware. The rest of the bags are ordinary black bags that might be mistaken for anyone else’s in a busy airport.

“Put this one in the front, please.” Black studs in Virus’ ears catch the light as he takes a book from his bag and then hands it to the porter. Trip sidles up next to him; their suits, all black with pristine white shirts, are impeccably tailored, fit to Virus’ slim frame, forgiving of Trip’s broad shoulders.

“Toue’s not down here yet?”

“He’s not done saying goodbye.”

Trip snorts a humorless laugh. “We had our own sort of goodbye, didn’t we?”

Noiz wishes he could see Virus’ face, but he doubts there is anything unguarded in his expression. Virus holds his book to his chest. “We are fortunate to have the chance to tell him goodbye.”

The grimace of a smile melts off of Trip’s face, and he looks at the employees packing the trunk of the black car. Noiz can scarcely hear his next words.  “He’s really going to die?”

“All things die, Trip.”

“He doesn’t have to.” Trip’s voice is low and dull.

“I agree with you that he is a special existence, but Toue has perfected the technology he needs from him. He is no longer useful.” The employees vanish back into the building and the car cuts the engine. Virus turns slightly away from Trip, adjusting his glasses. Noiz can hear him clearly in the new quiet. “You’re being sentimental. Or…are you being possessive?” Trip stares sullenly at the side of Virus’ head and then Virus chuckles under his breath and checks his Coil. “There are plenty of possibilities for new toys. Even Aoba-san might be brought to heel.”

The hairs on the back of Noiz’s neck stand on end. One thing to conjecture from Sei’s words that Aoba is alive, another thing to hear these two speak of him as a toy with which to while away the hours. Then again, Sei had made it clear that Aoba’s life was not now as it had been.

“T’s not the same.” Trip’s upper lip curls slightly, his nostrils flaring.

Virus scrolls through messages, humming in acknowledgment almost as an afterthought. “The rest of the team is at the airport already.” He closes the screens and then looks back at the door.

“Want me to get him?”

Virus shakes his head. “We have a schedule to maintain, and he knows that already.” Irritation pulls Virus’ lips into a thin line. “He is indulging himself.”

Trip glances at Virus and then ambles back toward the door. Noiz swallows a lump in his throat as Trip slides a keycard into the lock, through the skimmer. The lock releases, and the door slides open. Noiz can’t risk checking his Coil to see if the data collection and transmission was successful. He will have to wait until they’ve left. His lips are chapped; he licks them and his eyes dart to the door as it opens again. The slick sound of fine leather shoes, and the hollow tap of a cane against the floor precedes someone, but it can only be one person.

“We’re late,” Toue says, stepping over the threshold. His voice is fatherly and condescending; Noiz hates it immediately.

“Yes,” Virus responds. “The rest of the team is on the tarmac already.”

“Then let’s go, shall we?” But instead of moving, Toue turns and looks up at the tower, gold and stainless in the morning sun.  

The door opens, and Trip lopes out, slinging water off his hands. Without sparing a glance for Toue, he walks directly to the car, opening the door and disappearing into the dark interior.  Virus follows him, but stands at the door, waiting for Toue.

With a grunt of contentment, Toue sets the tip of his cane against the cement and walks to the car.

As soon as the limousine glides away from the curb, Noiz lets out breaths he’s shallowed for too long, gulping in more air as he checks his Coil. Unwilling to declare victory with a successful download, he gets to his feet, hissing at the sudden prickle of blood filling his feet again. A few keystrokes loads a blank card with the stolen data, and he retrieves the card skimmer, shoving the card into the lock. In less than three minutes, he’s inside Oval Tower, taking refuge in a storage closet.

The security system is a time-consuming lesson in picking his battles. Completely isolated from the rest of the networks, Noiz knew it would be an unknown quantity, but the architecture is alien to him. He can’t hack it, can’t even see how it works for over three hours. In desperation, he just consults a floor plan. A service elevator will only take him most of the way up the tower. The rest will have to be managed with cunning. The best he can do on short notice is patch in to the security feeds, work out which cameras are on and slip from alcove to alcove without being seen.

It’s fine until he’s near the top of the Tower, and more direct methods are being used to patrol the area. He recognizes the dog Allmate instantly—It’s a Toue model, after all—but weapons modules have never been allowed on Allmates under Japanese law. But then again, as its face slides away, revealing something shaped like the barrel of a gun, that doesn’t look like a harmless mod.

The card key is in his hand and he jams it into the nearest lock, wrenching it free and tumbling into darkness. The doors slide shut behind him.

He pulls out Usagi, tapping it awake. “Usagi, look at the floor plan for another way out of here.”

“Roger!”

Noiz listens at the door as the dog Allmate stalks past the door. It doesn’t even pause in the hallway, walking by as if it had not just chased an intruder into this room.

“Noiz, this room has one exit at the rear! It appears to go deeper into the tower!”

“You mean to the center?”

“Yes!”  

“We’ll cut through here then,” he mutters, and then slips past the entryway into the blackness of the main room. It’s warm in here, warmer than any part of the tower has been. Pumps and respirators gurgle and whirr, and the constant drone of fans and computers in the darkness fill his ears with a thick blanket of noise.  It takes a few moments for his eyes to adjust, but when they do, his mouth falls open. “Usagi.”

“Pi?”

“Record this. Record all of it.”

Fumbling for the switches at the wall doesn’t help. They don’t work, leaving the water-filled tanks scattered through the room as the only source of illumination. Eerie orange light washes over him, staining his skin the color of iodine as he passes near each tank.

“What are they doing here?” Noiz searches each tank, reaching out and nearly touching the glass. The thing inside the first one doesn’t respond, motionless as a corpse. But a corpse of what?

The next tank is no better. Though what’s inside it is much larger, it’s still unrecognizable, except for the glint of teeth embedded in what is not a skull, long blond—or is it white?—hair sprouting from parts of it that aren’t a head.

The next tank contains only a torso, very clearly human, severed at the neck and hip. At the center of it, skin and meat has been cut away primly, in surgical squares. What’s left is pulled back to expose the ribcage, bones gleaming like foundry-new copper. The sternum has been sawn in half, and the rounded edges of the break show it’s been there for quite some time. Flesh pumps and squirms underneath, life trained to trellis like any rose.

A thud against the glass wall of the tank next to him makes a horrified yelp escape him before he can cover his mouth. He drops Usagi in surprise, and it springs forward again, turning its cameras on the contents of the tank. A ventilator nearby works in short puffs as something white and eyeless beats against the glass again. A heavy collar festooned with tubes and pipes is clapped around its neck. More tubes coil into its stomach and out of it; they jerk every time the glass is struck. Pressing bony fingertips against the smooth inside of the cylinder, it feels the surface over and over in circular motions, like an artisan grinding down a stone surface and feeling for defects in the polish.

“Oh my God,” Noiz breathes. “What…is this?”

The thing stops feeling the inside of its tank. Its hair drifts out of the way, exposing the sunken-in sockets; Noiz can see healed scars, scalpel-thin, where the eyes should be. It—He, as Noiz can now see—tilts his head and then pushes his hand against the glass. Noiz feels the connection, the ache in his chest, a weight like his lungs have been caved in with a shovel. Reaching up, Noiz matches his hand to the one pressed against the inside of the glass. It’s warm under his hand—body temperature.

At first, there is no obvious change, and then a creeping blackness spreads through the long hair of the one in the tank, like a drop of ink in water. Noiz presses his other hand against the glass and the one in the tank mirrors it. A garland of bubbles slips from his bloodless lips as he butts his forehead against the tank.

“Sei?”

The one in the tank lifts his head and for a moment his lips move, forming some shape in the water, and then he presses his forehead against the glass again, going still. The respirator still whooshes, but speaking, tapping, knocking on the glass does nothing to rouse him.

“Noiz?” Usagimodoki hops in place.

It hardly seems likely that something like this is the source of Rhyme, the ‘treasured existence’. There is no ripple of energy, no change in gravity that should pull them together. He looks again at the one hanging motionless in the tank, and steps back. This is not the one who contacted him, not the Sei that kissed him where it meant something and granted him the ability to feel again.  He tears his eyes away from the wraith in the tank, picking up his Allmate. “We need to find Sei.”

The hall at the back of the room is narrower, darker, with plastic storage crates stacked against the walls. He can’t afford to wait around and see if another security Allmate shows up. Checking his floor plan, he moves down the hall at a brisk pace.

The access corridor spills out into an open antechamber, white with a ceiling made mostly of glass. The crown of Oval Tower is so close he can see the bolts holding the steel members together, but the blood-red doors at the other end of the room draw his eyes and quicken his footsteps. Noiz opens the door the bare minimum he needs to squeeze through, and lets it fall shut behind him as quietly as he can.

Any man of power would be instantly at ease in this room; there is nowhere to focus but on the man himself. “Looks like company presidents keep their offices the same all over the world, Usagi.”

“Pi!”

Noiz walks to the center of the room, looking down coldly at the sole desk, with its security screens and comfortable chair pushed out slightly and turned to the side. The floor-to-ceiling windows meet with skylights at the ceiling, but instinctively, Noiz follows the line of the building down to the earth. From here, Toue could look down on Platinum Jail, his greatest accomplishment, and Noiz looks down on them as well. At this height, the people below are no larger than mites. The Old Residents’ District is barely visible through the false night sky, a hazy smear over the rest of the island.

Tall white doors dominate one side of Toue’s office; the door on the other side is not nearly so ornate. “Guess that answers that question,” Noiz mutters out loud.   
  
“Pi?”

“Nothing. What’s the fastest way out of here?”

“Pi…. There is an elevator at the end of the hall behind the other door.”

“Executive elevator? Hopefully it’s not locked.”

“The keycard might unlock it,” Usagimodoki suggests helpfully.

“If not, we’ll have to find another way,” Noiz responds. “Go into standby mode.”

“Roger!”

As he pushes open the heavy white doors, a mixture of scents hits his nose, sweet and metallic and medicinal. The all-white floors and walls give way to damask curtains in Tiffany blue and checkered tile floors. Gift-wrapped packages and colorful stuffed animals are piled as high as Noiz is tall against one wall, faced by a bed made with crisp hospital corners. The windows—there are only three—all face the sea, a plain blue horizon less exciting than one that promises action. The ceiling is glass, open to Toue’s perpetual night.

The air is still; Noiz’s footsteps click on the tile as he walks more fully into the room. “Sei?”

A shuffling sound beyond a large stuffed animal draws Noiz’s attention, revealing a man seated in a plushly-upholstered chair, the back and sides carved like a throne. He is dressed the same way he was in Rhyme, in black and white leggings and a long-sleeved white shirt. His hat is pulled over his face, but his black eyes shift to Noiz.

“Guess you’ve been expecting me, huh?” Noiz mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking away before he can meet Sei’s gaze. “It wasn’t easy to get up here, you know. Not like walking in the front door.” Sei’s expression is inscrutable, and for once, Noiz doesn’t think it’s because he can’t read the air. Glancing down at Sei’s lap, his brows draw together in recognition at the shapes nestled on his legs, seemingly asleep. “Those guys,” he says out loud. A small black puppy with a syringe charm on his collar, and an overdressed redbird with geta. He nudges the bird with his finger, but there’s no response. “Dead battery?” He looks at Sei, as if Sei can answer. “Can’t leave them here…I’ll take them along. See if I can use them.”  

He checks his Coil. More than an hour past noon. “Since I don’t know exactly what Mink has in store, I should get started.” He tosses Sei’s hat into the pile of stuffed animals; a few wrenching movements pulls the white shirt over Sei’s head. Noiz ties together the ends of the sleeves, and then the bottom of the shirt. As he reaches for the small dog Allmate, a heavy boom rattles the tower, setting the curtains swaying. He quicksteps to the windows, pushing his face against the pane and trying to look around the curved face of Oval Tower.  

A column of dust and smoke is rising fast from an entire section of the wall of Platinum Jail, expanding higher and higher, billowing black and brown and red near the bottom. Looking down at the sliver of the pleasure district he can see, it’s absolute chaos. Sei’s room is so quiet he can hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears, but down there, a stampede begins, surging forward and swallowing people who don’t move, crushing them underfoot. He doesn’t have to look at the Coil traffic to know that it’s too jammed to communicate with anyone.

“Shit,” Noiz mutters, “Mink wasn’t kidding.” He hurries back to Sei’s side, shoving the dog and the bird through the collar into Sei’s shirt. He pulls off his tie and gives it an experimental yank between his hands to test its strength. “Sorry to change plans on you, Sei, but I’m not going to kill you.”

Sei is as limp as a rag doll, but as Noiz rights him in the chair. His sudden distress is obvious in the tightness around his eyes. There is a familiar ribbon of light, purple and turbulent, that threatens to snake through Noiz and steal his will away. Without hesitating, Noiz ties his tie around Sei’s head in a blindfold, to shield himself. Noiz crouches in front of the throne, looking at the way the pale green and navy fabric slides through dark hair, how his lips are parted for shallow breaths.

Despite the mayhem down on the street, here there is time for one moment for the two of them. He kisses Sei, his fingers sliding over his ear, around his tie. Their lips have barely met before Noiz reseats the kiss, begging with his lips for some response. But Sei doesn’t move, and Noiz settles back on his heels, frowning. Well, a response was only ever a best-case scenario anyway.

Settling the bundle of Allmates around Sei’s neck, Noiz turns and sits in his lap, pulling Sei onto his back in a pack-strap carry.  “That panic won’t last long, so we’d better move while we can.”

Sei exhales over Noiz’s shoulder, his body barely a burden as Noiz shoulders through the white doors and hustles to the elevator on the opposite side of Toue's office.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Using the panic following the bombing of Platinum Jail, Noiz slips away from Oval Tower with his prize. With Ren and Beni, he will begin unraveling the complex events of the last three months in Oval Tower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my fantastic beta, Harukami, for her work on this chapter. I am beginning work on an original novel but I promise that I'll continue working on this until it's done. I hope that you will support my original work the way you have supported this fic <3

The silence of Sei’s room is far removed from the deafening roar of humanity boiling in the cauldron of Platinum Jail. Every human body trembles in flight, long hair like the flashing wings of locusts, the slap of sandals and high heels against the pavement an alien chittering. Screams rise above the crowd—a name, a plea for help—and they go unanswered by the fleeing hordes of celebrity socialites and corporate royalty. Sei doesn’t shift against his back as Noiz hefts him closer and merges with the flow of human foot traffic.

“This way!” There are already guards in the streets, their weapons holstered in exchange for highly reflective batons to guide people. “Please do not panic! Take shelter in the prepared emergency areas!”

The screens around him flash, and the light has that quality that Noiz has come to dread. He can see the way it hits the pavement, purple refracting around the edges of rocks and bricks, the shadows revealing the suggestion in the transmission. He keeps his head down and carries Sei past the guards, trotting purposefully.

His heart races; he’s sure he’s red-faced, trying to go as fast as he can with Sei on his back. He never asked Mink what the nature of the distraction would be. Was there only one blast? Noiz hopes for another explosion to bounce thunder off the walls of Platinum Jail. He fabricates an excuse to use in case the next guard stops him—Sei fainted during the explosion and there’s medicine in his hotel room—but he never has to use it. Even though there is screaming and yelling all around him, no one stops him to ask who he’s carrying and why.

The door into the service corridor crashes closed behind them and Noiz takes a deep breath, shuffling off to the side with his ill-gotten captive. “Sorry, I have to take a break, Sei.”

The hallway dead-ends into what looks like a disused supply closet, with a utility cart and various other odds and ends that don’t have homes anywhere else. Not a place that someone would need to check in an emergency. He takes off the shirt-sack that holds the Allmates and drops it on the ground before kneeling and letting Sei slide off his back as well. Slinging his arms, he rubs at his muscles with a grimace.

“We stopped-pi!” Usagimodoki’s voice is muffled in Noiz’s pocket.

“Yes, we did.” Noiz flexes his fingers, not making any moves to retrieve Usagimodoki. “My arms hurt.” With a grunt, Noiz sits down next to Sei and takes stock of his situation. Breathing, shallow. A few fingers under the studded bracelet on his wrist makes Noiz frown. “Usagimodoki.”

“Pi!”

“Can you find any signs of an info chip in him? Like one an Allmate would use?”

“Scanning…no!”

“No Allmate.” He looks at Sei’s blindfolded face and then purses his lips, sighing. “Guess that’d be too easy.”

“Pi?”

Noiz shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it, Usagi. We can just take his vitals the normal way.” He lets his head fall back against the concrete wall with a thunk. “Maybe they won’t be able to track him if he doesn’t have a chip.”

He glances at Sei, but nothing in his face or body language has changed. Noiz reaches up and rubs his face. “I have no idea what to do now.” 

Usagimodoki lags in responding for a moment and then pipes up. “The best thing to do is get home, pi!”

Noiz huffs a tired laugh. “Yeah.”

To change which muscles get tired, he carries Sei and his bundle of Allmates in a princess carry. Sei may be underweight, but after carrying him for so long, his arms are screaming. The irony of the situation isn’t lost on him—a few months ago, he’d have carried Sei until his own body broke down seemingly without reason. He looks down at Sei’s face for a few steps, something in his chest swelling until it hits his ribcage and then turning inside out. The discomfort doesn’t go away even when he retrains his eyes on the horizon.

The streets of the eastern part of the Old Residents’ District are full of people staring at the wreckage of Platinum Jail’s wall. The dust has cleared away, leaving only the blue-black haze of smoldering fires in the rubble. Hushed voices cling to his ears, wretched and confused. But what Noiz possibly say to put their minds at ease? They stare up at the screens above them, waiting for news from Toue.

“We’re home,” yells Usagimodoki as Noiz closes the door with one foot. He takes off his shoes by pulling them off at the heels and steps into his apartment.

“Home,” Noiz groans, shuffling into his bedroom and stretching Sei out on the bed, the bundle of Allmates on his lap.

With a gentle hand, he unknots the tie. Black eyes return his gaze without threatening violet and the steadiness of his stare shames Noiz into keeping the silence unbroken. Without meeting his eyes again, Noiz undresses him for bed like a doll, taking off clothes until Sei is down to his tank top and pants. No studded cuffs or collars; as Noiz has now learned, they aren’t comfortable for sleeping.

Trudging into the kitchen, he fills a glass with tap water and is halfway back to the couch before he looks down at it in his hand. Absentmindedly, he takes a drink of the water and leans against the doorframe, looking at Sei.

“I live alone, except for Usagimodoki,” he blurts out. His voice echoes off the hardwood floors. He pushes off the doorframe with his shoulder, ambling to the bed and setting the glass down on the bedside table. “I’m not good at anticipating the needs of other people,” he continues, retrieving a chair from the main room. Noiz brings it into his room, ready to set up vigil amid the half-constructed computers and jar lids full of thumbscrews.

Sei stares at the ceiling, blinking listlessly.

“You’ll have to instruct me.” Noiz leans forward and takes the glass in hand again, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding Sei’s head up a little. “Drink.”

Water streams uselessly against the corners of Sei’s mouth, but then he takes it in, a little at a time. Noiz watches his throat to see that he swallows it, and the tension at the corners of Noiz’s mouth eases when he does. A little bit of arranging props Sei’s head up, as if he will be talking or paying attention to the work Noiz is doing. Usagimodoki hops up to Sei’s chest and stays there, supervising the operations. It doesn’t take long to find the tools he needs in his apartment. He long ago acquired all the special screwdrivers for opening up Allmates. Watching Usagi move up and down with each breath Sei takes is somehow comforting.

 “Yeah, dead battery,” Noiz pronounces, looking into the guts of the dark blue puppy. “Shouldn’t take long to power it up. Red bird is probably the same way.”

He examines the red bird first, cracking the case apart with a screwdriver held as a lever and a little bit of force to wedge it open. The battery is a common one, easy enough to find and replace, but the little bird barely has electricity in its circuits again before it begins throwing virus warnings on the home network.

“This worm has been patched for months,” Noiz grumbles, isolating the Allmate from his systems and beginning to piece together the bird’s memory and startup routine from an onboard backup. He plugs in a charging cable under the bird’s wing and the extra juice is enough to allow the AI to boot up. Noiz immediately wishes he’d waited.

“—I oughta—“ A shrill, combative voice whistles out of the bird’s mouth. “—The fuck—“

“Foul mouthed from hanging around all those Ribsters, I see,” Noiz says sourly, recycling the system.

“—Koujaku—“ Beni’s voice cuts out again as the AI shuts down again. The voice pattern grates on Noiz’s nerves, but he restores it exactly as it had been before it was crippled by malware and slowly ran out of batteries. Leaving the AI off while it charges will let it charge faster.

More serious is the problem with finding a way to charge the dog Allmate.  Rummaging around in one of the bins of spare cabling, looking for adapters that provide power and data, he assembles the likely suspects on the bed. Matching amperage and male-to-female ends is difficult, especially when something is this old. Chaining together a series of adapters, he constructs a charger and plugs it into the port on the puppy’s belly.

Noiz goes through the same procedures he did with the redbird, restoring from back-up and cleaning out the worm infection. It’s a relief to see that the most recent backup was performed over 3 months ago. Additional damage may have been done, but being out of commission might have been the best way for these two to survive Toue’s scorched-earth firmware updates. He looks at the dog’s fluffy belly fur and brushes it briefly, patting it under his hand. His lips twitch in a small smile.

“Aoba.”

“No,” Noiz replies.

Silence hangs between them, filled with Sei’s faint breathing and the occasional click of the screwdriver against the head of a screw. “Noiz.” 

Noiz’s voice is low. “Right.”

“Ah.”

“You’re Ren, Aoba’s Allmate.” Noiz doesn’t look up from collecting his tools on the bed.  

“Yes.”

“I found you with him,” Noiz says, gesturing to Sei. “Just by accident.”

“I do not believe it was an accident.” 

Noiz snorts softly, the smile returning as he turns away, dropping his tools into trays. “Doesn’t surprise me. This guy seems to have all the answers.”

“Do you know him?”

“In a way,” Noiz allows, not yet willing to share knowledge of his newfound world of sensation. “Although he doesn’t volunteer much information.”

Ren looks at the redbird charging on Sei’s lap.

“He’s the old man’s Allmate, right?”

“Yes. His name is Beni.”

Noiz sits back down in the chair heavily, looking at Ren. “They failed to stop Toue.” He can’t keep the accusatory note out of his voice. “What happened?”

“A man named Ryuuhou distracted Aoba and Koujaku. He had some connection to Koujaku, and there was a hard fight. The members of Benishigure came to their aid, but they could not help much in Oval Tower. ”

Noiz narrows his eyes. “You’re leaving a lot out.”

“There were things of a personal nature between Aoba and Koujaku.”

“Were they together?”

Ren’s expression doesn’t change, but he sounds almost offended at the prying question. “Together?”

“When they were captured.”

“Yes.”

Noiz leans back in the chair. “And after you were captured? They didn’t take you apart?”

“I…” Ren looks down at the bed, where his little puppy paws dent the blanket. “I don’t think so.”

“Did you get booted up again after they captured them?”

Ren doesn’t answer.

“Ren.” The voice from Sei is thin, as ephemeral as dried-out butterfly wings, barely more than his lips moving. He closes his eyes briefly, as if even saying that overtaxed his reserves of strength.

Ren shuffles, as if he wants to escape the discomfort of informing on his master. “Aoba started me up after he was captured, but he had changed. He is working with Toue.”

Noiz frowns, sucking at his teeth with a sidelong glance at Sei. “I can fill you in on some of the details, but for the rest of it, we’ll probably have to compare notes with Mink. That can wait until tomorrow, I guess, or whenever he feels like answering a message.” He opens a keyboard and boots up Beni’s AI.

The redbird kicks one leg up and then rolls around, looking at his surroundings. “Ehh?? What is this dump?”

“Beni,” Ren interjects.

Beni hops over to Ren’s side, reaching out a wing to pat him affectionately. “Yo, Ren! Did we make it out? Did Aoba come to his senses?”

“Not quite.” Ren looks up at Noiz with a slightly guilty pause. “Noiz rescued us.”

“Not on purpose,” Noiz amends. “I was there for Sei.”

“Ooh, this guy!” Beni’s feathers puff up a little as his eyes fall on Noiz. “Maniac helping someone? For free?”

Noiz should correct him; he hadn’t done it for free, isn’t still doing it for free. There was a significant potential cost to him—jail time, deportation, even death—but he had gotten involved anyway. He is still involved, still not quite bolting for the exit. “It’s none of your business,” he says.

A soft whirring spins up in Ren’s processing unit, all but confirming that the Allmates are communicating directly. “I’m grateful for your rescue. I’m sure Beni is as well.”

Beni glances up at Sei’s face and then puffs up grudgingly. “Yeah, thanks, I guess.”

Noiz nods. He hadn’t expected to be thanked, certainly not by the man whose life he’d saved instead of taken. His eyes flick up to Sei. There doesn’t seem to be any recognition there, his eyes distantly focused on something beyond the opposite wall of the bedroom.

“Noiz!”  Usagimodoki’s voice intrudes on his thoughts. “It is time to eat!”

Beni looks up at Noiz with a slightly suspicious expression. “You don’t seem like the kind of guy to schedule things down to the minute.”

Noiz looks at Ren and then Beni and picks up the red bird, shuffling him off of Sei’s chest. “I’m full of surprises. Usagi, do you think any place would deliver after today?”

“Checking location hours, pi!”

The pizza shop that usually delivers to Noiz is open and delivering; it’s not a bad choice for a celebratory meal. The usual order goes out—enough to feed him for tonight and a few days after—and he doesn’t even think of Sei until the courier buzzes the intercom.

Noiz doesn’t eat at the low table in front of the couch, although he does Sei the favor of not taking his leg room up with a pizza box, carrying a few slices in on a plate and sitting down next to the bed. Ren slips under Sei’s right hand, leaning his shoulder against Sei’s body, looking exactly like a pet dog should: snuggled up against the invalid for moral support. Beni nests in the hair on top of his back and goes into sleep mode, on account of there being nothing to do with Koujaku.

The role of steward seems to come naturally to Noiz, as long as he doesn’t have to think too hard about it. It’s no different than checking on a downloading file or a defragging hard drive. Each time, he searches for a change in Sei’s expression, but everything receives the same blank stare that he had in Oval Tower.

“Want some? It’s just cheese.”

Sei blinks slowly, looking at the offered pizza with entrenched indifference. His eyes lift back up to Noiz, and after a moment, he opens his mouth.

Noiz has to get a knife and fork—plastic, the kind that come with delivery—to cut a small bit of greasy, salty cheese and bread off the tip of his pizza slice. In it goes, and Sei obediently closes his mouth but does nothing else.

“…are you going to chew it?”

Sei furrows his brow and he works his jaw slowly for nearly a minute, grinding away at the soft dough and cheese as if he were a dog with a bone. And at the end of it, he looks back at Noiz, licking his lips.

“Good?”

Sei nods slightly, looking at the remaining portion of the pizza slice. Even if he has not yet realized it, he is ravenous, his black eyes quick to follow the morsel as it travels from plate to mouth. He closes his eyes as he chews, relief and pleasure lighting his features.

“It’s just pizza.”

Sei closes his eyes briefly. “No.” His frail voice cracks from disuse. “I don’t eat.”

“Don’t eat?” Noiz pauses with the knife and fork halfway through cutting Sei another bite.

“Tubes.” Sei manages, swallowing in anticipation. “They feed me with tubes.”

Slowly, as if in a dream, Noiz offers the bite to Sei; Sei accepts it with relish. “But there weren’t any tubes when I found you.”

Sei’s lips are pink now, blood flushed into them by the action of eating, and glistening with fat. “No.” He swallows again with effort, concentrating.

The plastic knife and fork clatter against each other on the plate as Noiz drops them in disgust. “They were going to let you starve to death.” He repeats it again, the sentence given form and reality just by being said. “They were going to let you starve to death?”

Sei’s eyes linger on the discarded knife and fork before he nods.

Noiz purses his lips, tamping down the cold anger that rises in him at Sei’s admission. Even his life, which his parents would have rather done without, would have rather seen expunged, wiped away, excised from this world like a tumor that’s good for nothing but taking from those around him. Even _his_ parents fed him.

Hot tears of anger gather in his eyes, and Noiz clenches his jaw, standing up and walking out of the room for a moment to collect himself. He washes his hands, feeling the need to rub them. It fills an aching void in his chest to be able to touch his own skin and remind himself that he exists, that he is still here.

Noiz looks at Sei’s body in his bed and then sits down again next to him. The plate and the rest of the pizza end up on the floor, half shoved under the bed in favor of scooting his chair closer.

The exhaustion of the day has already caught up with Sei; his eyes are closed and his breathing is deep and even. With fierce green eyes, he reaches out across the blanket and slides his hand into Sei’s. Noiz gives his hand a gentle squeeze; Sei's fingers hold fast to Noiz's, but he does not return it.

Motes of dust waltz in the sunlight as the setting sun washes the room in purple and red and gold. Noiz begins to nod in his chair, but their hands remain connected.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has taken me a long time to write for several reasons. But the biggest reason is that this chapter is really where Dark Eyed Mender and Carry That Weight collide in the most direct way. I really worried about how well I was able to write that, so I ended up completely rewriting this chapter twice before I thought it did justice to the events that happen in it. 
> 
> As always, my sincere thanks to my lovely beta, harukami. 
> 
> And as a special dedication to one of my most steadfast readers who encouraged me along the way, this chapter is for Kuma, since it's full of the feelin that they love most.

Even before he’s fully awake, Noiz knows that falling asleep in the chair was a bad idea. His Coil is blinking; there’s a message, but instead of checking it he lifts his head, taking in a sharp breath at the crick in his neck and the twisting pain in his shoulder. The wan light of dawn filters in through the window, cutting the room into blue shadows.

“You’re awake.” Sei’s voice is hoarse.

Blearily, Noiz looks at Sei, and frowns. Somehow, Sei is so much less visible now than he was then, that one time in the Rhyme field. He’s no longer radiant; he’s barely visible as more than a collection of shades. “Yeah, I nodded off after you did.” He rubs the sleep out of his eyes and then stretches his arms behind his back. “Did you sleep through the night?”

“No.”  Sei returns Noiz’s steady gaze before speaking again. “But that is not unusual.”

Noiz rubs the ache in the side of his neck, looking down Sei’s body. “You don’t look like you moved at all.” A faint frown creases his brow. “You haven’t used the bathroom since we got here, either.”

“I hadn’t taken food or water in a while,” Sei replies.

Noiz is already moving Ren and Beni to the side to pull back the covers, and his mouth tightens a bit, remembering the revelations of last night. He scoops Sei up in his arms and carries him into the bathroom.   

“Can you stand at all?”

Sei appraises the commode and then hums softly. “A little.”

Working together, with more instruction to Sei’s movements than Noiz would have normally thought necessary, they get Sei sat down. Sei clings to him to keep him there while he relieves himself. Noiz keeps his eyes trained on the wall.

“Why do you look away?”

“It’s polite to give someone privacy when they’re in the bathroom.” Noiz trails off helplessly, the sound of Sei’s piss draining into the water in a weak stream echoing in the bathroom.

“I usually had a catheter,” Sei responds. The bathroom goes silent as a tomb; Sei has finished, and after a moment, Noiz turns his attention back to him to clean him up and dress him again. Sei lets Noiz pull his pants back up, holding on to his shoulders as he moves around.

“When did they remove the feeding tubes?” Noiz hefts Sei up in his arms, carrying him back into the bedroom.

“A few days ago,” Sei answers.

Noiz pulls the bedding back over Sei, tucking him back in. He looks at Ren and Beni, wondering if he should move them back to their original positions, but decides against it. If they want to be close to Sei, they’ll move after they come out of sleep mode.

“You didn’t tell me not to come.” Noiz leans down to collect up the trash from the pizza they ate the night before. “If you were going to die anyway, you could have just stayed there and died, like you wanted.”

Sei doesn’t respond, looking at Noiz and directly meeting his eyes. “And would you have listened to me if I had asked you not to?”

Noiz looks down at the pizza box. “Yes.”

“Liar.” The accusation is soft, but Noiz doesn’t flinch away from it.

“Is that one of your powers too?” Noiz walks into the main room, bringing the trash into the kitchen, and calls over his shoulder. “Knowing when someone is lying?”

“I have many powers.” Sei’s voice is almost too soft to be heard outside the bedroom.

Noiz doesn’t hurry in the kitchen, and Sei doesn’t offer anything more than that non-answer. But he is sitting up when Noiz walks back into the bedroom. Noiz gives Sei a penetrating look. “Then you knew how to tell me not to come for you.”

“It doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t do,” Sei replies evasively. “You still came, and you wouldn’t have listened if I’d told you not to.”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t have.” Noiz sits down in the chair again, looking at Sei. “I don’t like owing debts.”

“So you’ve said.”

“You would have been happy, dying like that?”

“Not happy.” Sei looks toward the window, where the sky is beginning to turn pink. “I accepted it.”

“And being murdered is better than starving to death.”

Sei doesn’t answer for a long time, watching birds begin to fly outside, though his eyes dance between the rose-dappled clouds and Noiz. Noiz is nearly ready to give up and walk away when Sei mutters, “Yes.”

“It is.” Noiz repeats the words, affirming them even as he asks the question with them, _Is it really better?_

Sei turns his head and those bottomless black eyes back to Noiz. “Yes.”

Noiz leans back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest. In ordinary conversations, silence is loud. It presses in around words in the throat, on the tip of the tongue, and smothers them. But Sei’s silence is inviting, almost coquettish. His eyes pull at Noiz to continue talking, the long, steady stare reminding Noiz that he is in a conversation.

“It’s me.” Noiz says suddenly, sitting forward in his chair.

“Is it?”

“If you wanted it done fast, anyone would do.” Noiz watches Sei and something sickening awakens in the pit of Noiz’s stomach, a suspicion that Sei, too, wanted to feel something before he died. He searches Sei’s face for guilt, for a smile, for anything that tells him he’s guessed right. “You wanted to see me, even if I was going to kill you.”

The silence is a tenuous promise, a connection that lies open all the time.  

“…yes.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“I was going to kill you, so it matters to me.” Sei had wanted to be killed by Noiz, to have a human connection for one instant, even if death quickly follows.

Sei tilts his head slightly, his hair falling against his shoulder. “You depended on me.” Sei looks down at his hand, and then at Noiz, his soft voice mingling with the sounds of the world outside awakening. “Every match requires my presence as Usui, because I mediate the game data. It all passes through me.” He settles back against the pillows, sinking a little deeper into the mattress.

“Everything.” The biggest pipe on the island handles Rhyme traffic, and all of it has to pass through Sei. The connection strength, the packets containing information about the players, Allmate models, and attacks, the damage—“The damage too?”

“…Yes.”

Rhyme generated sensations of pain, and all those had to be processed through Sei’s brain. Every hit he’d dealt, every hit he’d taken—for the sake of _his_ entertainment, Sei suffered.

Worse, it doesn’t matter that Noiz found a way to ‘remove’ Usui from his Drive-by: Sei had been necessary to process it anyway. He hadn’t fooled a program into believing that his Rhyme matches were legal; Sei granted his requests for a match, knowing that the matches weren’t official.

Noiz stands up abruptly, escaping out into the main room, away from the suffocating feeling of learning too much. Only after he’s paced the length of his apartment does he go back to the bedroom, leaning against the doorframe. Somehow the distance makes it less uncomfortable to look at him.

"Is it just that?"

"Just what?"

"Are you just Rhyme?" Noiz jams his hands in his pockets and steps into the room again. "If Toue had a new way of doing Rhyme, he was going to let you die, so he won't come looking for you, right?"

"I don't know."

"It's okay if he doesn't." Noiz’s eyes stay in a safe place, on the foot of the bed, on the Allmates nestled near Sei’s feet. His lips are stuck in a stubborn pout. “It’s okay if he never comes back.”

Sei says nothing, and after a moment, Noiz risks looking away from the safest places. His eyes trip haltingly over the gathers in his sheets, over Sei’s hands folded at his waist. Sei’s chest rises and falls shallowly, and his lashes shade his eyes until the very last moment. Their gazes meet like outstretched hands, chilled and seeking warmth in each other.

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m….” Noiz looks down at his hands, expecting to see a fist, but instead there’s only a damp palm, pressing against his thigh to steady itself. “I am.”

“Are you afraid?” It doesn’t sound like an accusation.

Noiz searches Sei’s eyes and then his eyes drop to Sei’s mouth, half open, waiting for an answer. “I… am.”

“Of what happens if Toue comes back?” Sei’s dark lashes flutter closed. “Or what happens if he doesn’t?”

“If he—“

A heavy fist pounds on the door. Sei’s eyes open, a glimmer of fear alive in them for a moment before calm acceptance falls over his face.

Noiz curses under his breath as the moment slips away. Sullen, he pads to the door and throws the bolt, opening the front door wide enough to see through but no wider.

“Noiz.”

Noiz looks over his shoulder at the door to his bedroom, slightly ajar. “Now’s not really a good time.”

“Wh—“ Mujina cranes his head to try to see past Noiz. “Why not? Got a girl over?”

Noiz narrows the opening in the door to a crack. “Something like that.”

Mujina stares dumbly at Noiz’s face before laughing out loud. “Come on, let me in. We gotta talk.”

Unable to completely hide his disgust, Noiz lets the door fall open and walks to the bedroom, pulling the door shut before Mujina can get his shoes off.

Mujina notices Sei’s boots in the genkan and looks over his shoulder at Noiz. “Are these…?”

Noiz crosses his arms over his chest. “Did you think I was lying?”

Mujina’s eyes dart to the bedroom door. “Is she… did you….” The blank stare he receives is response enough; he raises his hands in defeat. “Okay, okay. I’d been trying to get a hold of you for hours. You didn’t answer the message I sent, so now I know why.”

Noiz frowns, recalling that there _had_ been a message that he had ignored in favor of checking on Sei. “What’s going on that’s so urgent?”

“Rhyme is completely offline. There’s no response at all from a ping to the servers.”

Noiz doesn’t quite manage to stifle a yawn. “Not surprising, given that explosion yesterday.”

“Yeah but that was the wall.” Mujina shook his head, as if he was begging Noiz to keep up with him. “Server building is in Black Valley.”

“So?”

“So…. What?” Mujina makes a helpless gesture with his hands open. “What do you mean ‘so’?”

Noiz lifts his chin, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the wall so that his body obscures the bedroom door. “You’re the one with contacts in Toue. Why are you telling me?”

“They’re not responding to messages either.”

The specter of Virus and Trip floats in the back of his mind. It’s possible that these two are Mujina’s contacts, out of Japan with their boss. If that’s the case, they’d be spending most of their international phone calls on discussions with the authorities. Noiz uncrosses his arms and shrugs. “Maybe it’s offline while they examine login records—“

“Do you think Rhyme had something to do with the terrorist attack?”

“Do you?”

“Yes? No? I don’t know!” Mujina’s fists clench and his brow furrows. “I don’t know anything that’s going on right now!”

“You’re the one who’s running an official team. Maybe you should keep your ears open.” Noiz can’t resist the stab at Mujina getting carried away with his ambitions. “In any case, it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“You’re still going to make predictions, right?” There’s a crack in Mujina’s voice, and instead of clearing his throat, he finishes the question in a reedy voice.

The ever-more-undisturbed air presses into Noiz’s ears with a shrill whine. “Just get them from Toue. I’m done with Rhyme.”

“You’re not done. You?” Mujina’s mouth hangs open in disbelief. “You’d never quit. You don’t have anything else.”

It’s true, or it would have been, were it not for the events of the last 24 hours. For the first time in a long time, there is something Noiz cares enough about to see it through. “There are things that are more important than Rhyme.”

“Like what? Someone you just brought home?” An incredulous half-chuckle spills out of Mujina. “Does that really justify ending everything you’ve worked for?”

Sei is Rhyme, Rhyme is Sei. “He is everything I’ve worked for.” _Sei_ is Sei. “It’s time to take the next step.”

Mujina’s shoulders sag slightly. A shadow of confusion—no, irritation, Noiz can recognize that now—passes over his face. “You’re not making sense, Noiz.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you.” Noiz tucks his hands into his pockets to hide the way his hands are curling up.“I know what makes sense and what I’m going to do about it.”

“So this is really it. You’re really leaving.”

“There’s no future in Rhyme any more. As a—“ The word _friend_ catches in his throat. He knows it’s true even as he struggles to say it, only because he has so recently come to understand it. “As a friend, I think it’s best if you get out now.”

This shatters the stun that’s held Mujina prisoner. Anger sweeps over his reddening face. “The fuck do you mean ‘there’s no future’? You’re an idiot.” He turns away, moving his thumb between his first and middle fingers to soothe the desire for a cigarette. “Fuck! We just got a sponsorship.” His hands twitch into fists, and he curses again.

“That’s just the way I see it.”

“Yeah, well.” Mujina stalks toward the genkan, jamming his feet into his shoes. “If I need anything I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah.” Noiz watches Mujina angrily pull the backs of the shoes up from under his heels. “Seriously, let me know.”

With a fierce glare, Mujina gives him a curt nod and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

“You’re leaving the Rhyme team you made.” Sei looks up as Noiz enters the bedroom again. He’s pulled the blue dog Allmate into his lap. Soothingly, he pets him. Ren’s tail doesn’t wag at all.

“Yeah.” Noiz sits down in the chair. “Something like that.”

“But Rhyme is important to you.”

“Not anymore.”

Sei falls quiet, as if carefully weighing what he wants to say, and finding himself with nothing that fits, remains speechless.

“It’s you.” Noiz’s pale eyes are steady, his tone resolute. “It’s only you from now on.”

Sei’s hand stills on Ren’s back. His voice sounds faint. “I…see.”

“Sei.” Ren’s voice is unexpected, as is the direct way he is addressing him. “Thank you.”

For the first time Noiz seems to realize that Ren has moved. “Is something wrong?”

“Noiz.” Ren’s little pink tongue sticks out of his mouth. “Before you returned, I was speaking to Sei about the next move we must make.”

“Next move?”

“Yes.” He fluffs his tail up and then sits down, shifting so he can speak to both Noiz and Sei at the same time. “Since you charged my battery, I have been monitoring activity in Aoba’s Allmate chip.”

“He’s still got it, huh?” Well, it’s a pain to remove them, so it might as well be left in until it absolutely needed to be replaced.

“Yes, and I am able to receive information from it.” He looks at Sei. “He is in the Old Residents’ District, but his vital signs are erratic. He is distressed.”

Old Residents’ District? “So Mink was able to grab him.” Noiz snorts a laugh. “Distressed is probably the best reaction to that kind of guy.”

Ren nods, pulling his tongue back in his mouth. “As I was saying to Sei, in this current state I am cut off from him and unable to help him. So I should go back to the way it was.” He pauses, the gravity of what he’s suggesting needing a firm understanding from Sei. After a moment, Sei takes in a slightly deeper breath. “It may be too dangerous to leave here if someone is looking for either one of you. I apologize for the inconvenience, but the best way is if Sei can create a path through the network so that I can return to him.”

“No, no,” Noiz says, shaking his head. “You’re an Allmate. Even if you’re going to transfer to a new body, you have to be properly shut down. As old as your model is, you’d need to back up information, personality files, pre-install drivers for the new chassis, configure it—God, the _updates_ \--even if you’re using a perfect copy of the existing model, doing it remotely isn’t possible.“

“There is a body there that I can transfer into.” Ren says dismissively, all his attention on Sei. He stands up, pressing on Sei’s leg with his paws. “Sei, there isn’t much time.”

“Wait, what?” Noiz looks between the two of them, but Sei glances at Noiz and the question dies on his lips.

Sei’s thin hand settles on Ren’s head, stroking his fur rhythmically. “If you get there and you are forced out, it is likely you will cease to exist.”

“If I cannot protect him, then that is for the best.” Ren’s voice is dispassionate, reasonable. “Even if he Destroys me…being an Allmate is no longer useful to him. Being unable to help him is painful.” He hesitates for just a moment before continuing. If Ren were not an Allmate, Noiz would think his voice a little choked with emotion. “We should be together.”

There’s something going on here that Noiz doesn’t quite grasp. He’s well-versed in Allmates and how to transfer their contents using the cloud or a portable disk. But Ren doesn’t seem to be talking about data transfer at all. Instead, this Allmate, this _machine_ , is talking as if he and Aoba were souls, long-parted, about to be reunited.

Noiz looks at the ancient Toue model Allmate, the oldest chassis still running of any he knew, the one he’d puzzled over on the floor of Aoba’s bedroom. _Just for a chance to be with Aoba? What if it doesn’t work?_  Noiz knows what will happen if it doesn’t work and the question rings in his mind anyway, over and over. Even without being able to predict the outcome, Ren will sacrifice himself to for the chance to help Aoba.

Looking up at Sei, he finds that Sei is already looking at him, instead of returning the pleading look from Ren. Sei’s eyes unfocus slightly as he looks at Noiz’s face, and then he closes them. “Very well. If this is your choice, I will help.”

Ren’s tail begins to wag. “Yes. It is my choice. Now, please, hurry.”

With an agonizing slowness to his movements, Sei pulls Ren closer, letting him sit down right up next to him. Petting his forehead with just the tips of his fingers, Sei nods almost imperceptibly.

There are no cables, no wired connection, not even any flashing LEDs in his eyes to indicate that he is undergoing a large data transfer. His eyes are open and then with a sound like a camera shutter, they snap closed. Like a machine shutting off gratefully after many years of service, his disks spin down, the fans stop, and Ren’s tail flops to the bed, still.


End file.
